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Pigs'-Feet Souse
Cut off the horny parts of feet and toes, scrape, clean, and wash thoroughly, singe off the stray hairs, place in a kettle with plenty of water, boil, skim, pour off water and add fresh, and boil until the bones will pull out easily; do not bone, but pack in a stone jar with pepper and salt sprinkled between each layer; cover with good cider vinegar. When wanted for the table, take out a sufficient quantity, put in a hot skillet, add more vinegar, salt, and pepper if needed, boil until thoroughly heated, stir in a smooth thickening of flour and water, and boil until flour is cooked; serve hot as a nice breakfast dish. Or, when the feet have boiled until perfectly tender, remove the bones and pack in stone jar as above; slice down cold when wanted for use. Let the liquor in which the feet are boiled stand over night; in the morning remove the fat and prepare and preserve for use as directed in the Medical Department.
A two-stage recipe: a long boil and a vinegar pack that keeps, then a quick skillet gravy at the moment of serving. The pack is the part that needs rethinking.
- Storage is the one thing to changeA stone jar of vinegared pigs' feet was kept in a cold cellar or springhouse, not a warm kitchen. Pack it in glass or food-grade plastic, keep it refrigerated, and treat it as a week's worth of eating rather than a winter's.
- Buy them splitButchers and Latin, Chinese and Southern markets sell pigs' feet already split lengthwise, which shortens cooking and makes the meat easier to pick. Ask for hind feet if there is a choice; they carry more meat.
- Singeing and scrapingModern feet usually arrive clean, but stray bristles are common. Pass them over a gas flame or hit them with a kitchen torch, then scrape with the back of a knife under running water.
- The two watersThe first boil is discarded to take away scum and the strongest smell. Bring to a boil, skim hard for five minutes, drain, rinse the pot and the feet, then start again in fresh water.
- "Until the bones pull out easily"At a bare simmer that is roughly 2.5 to 3.5 hours for split feet. Keep the water at a shiver, not a rolling boil, or the skin shreds and the collagen turns to mush.
- Vinegar strength"Good cider vinegar" of the period was home-made and variable in acidity, unlike today's standardised bottled 5 percent. Use straight 5 percent cider vinegar undiluted; the feet must be fully submerged, which takes a good deal of vinegar.
- The skillet gravyThe thickening is a flour-and-water slurry, roughly 1 tablespoon flour to 2 tablespoons cold water per cup of liquid. Add it off the boil, whisk smooth, then simmer two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- The "Medical Department" liquorThe chilled fat skimmed from the pot is essentially lard, which the recipe sends to the book's medical section rather than the kitchen; such fats were typically the base for salves and ointments. The jelly under it is a strong pork stock and is worth keeping for beans or greens.
- YieldA quart jar holds a few feet and gives a small number of breakfast servings. For the cold-sliced version the recipe has you remove the bones and pack as before, then slice down cold; packing the boned meat tightly while warm helps it set firm enough to slice.
Souse is an old word for pickling in brine or vinegar, reaching English by way of Old French -- to "souse" a joint meant to steep it -- and it attached itself in America to the vinegared trimmings of the hog: feet, ears, snout, and the jellied loaf that other regions call head cheese. It belongs to the winter hog-killing calendar, when a household butchered its own animals and nothing was allowed to go to waste; the feet, too bony to roast and too gelatinous to fry, went into the crock, and the fat came off the top for the medicine chest. That the recipe ends by sending the pot liquor to the book's Medical Department is characteristic of The Dixie Cook-Book and of nineteenth-century domestic manuals generally, which treated cooking, cleaning, and doctoring as one continuous set of household skills. Souse survives in the South and the Caribbean, still sold in jars, still eaten cold with vinegar and pepper.