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Stewed Calf's Feet
Put a well-cleaned calf's foot into a saucepan with four onions, two or three cloves, one bayleaf, pepper and salt and stew all gently until done. Then remove all the meat from the bones, cut it into small pieces, egg and breadcrumb them and fry them in butter to a light brown. Serve the foot with a puree of tomatoes or mushrooms.
A terse late-Victorian braise that assumes you know a calf's foot needs hours, not minutes. Two things the text leaves out: the cooking liquid and the time.
- The hinge: cook it to collapseA calf's foot is nearly all skin, cartilage and connective tissue. It needs 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer before the meat and gelatinous rind will pull cleanly from the bones. Undercooked, it is rubbery and impossible to pick.
- Liquid is implied, not stated"stew gently" here presumably means barely covered with water or light veal stock, lid on, kept just below a simmer with only occasional bubbles. A hard boil emulsifies the fat and clouds everything.
- SourcingCalves' feet are a special order from a butcher and usually come split lengthwise. Ask for them cleaned and singed; if not, scrub, scald in boiling water for 5 minutes, scrape off any remaining hair, and rinse.
- Four onions to one footThat is a heavy aromatic load by modern taste. Two medium onions, quartered, gives plenty of flavour, and the cloves are best stuck into an onion half so they can be fished out.
- Chill the picked meatThe gelatin sets firm when cold, which makes the picked meat far easier to cut into neat pieces for crumbing. Spread it on a tray, press lightly, refrigerate an hour, then cut.
- Egg and breadcrumbThe text calls only for egg and crumbs; a preliminary dusting of flour helps the egg grip. Fry in clarified butter, or half butter and half oil, over medium heat, since whole butter can brown before the pieces colour evenly.
- "Serve the foot"Most likely meaning the fried pieces, with tomato or mushroom puree as the sauce, since by this stage only the bones of the foot remain; those are worth returning to the pot for stock.
- YieldA single calf's foot will make roughly a first course for two, or one main; the recipe itself gives no guidance.
Calf's foot was a workhorse of nineteenth-century cookery for one reason: it was the household source of gelatin, before sheet and powdered gelatin were cheap and reliable. Calf's-foot jelly appears in a great many English and American cookbooks of the century, prescribed for invalids as much as served at table, and this recipe is essentially a savoury use of the same raw material, fried rather than set as jelly. The egg-and-breadcrumb finish is a familiar French treatment for boiled offal and tripe, giving a crisp edge to something otherwise soft. Feet have largely dropped out of American home cooking since, though they survive in stocks, in Italian and Latin American braises, and anywhere a cook wants body in a sauce without a thickener.