No. 1659

Sheep's Trotters a la Poulette

Pieds de Mouton a la Poulette

Prepare and cook them as for the vinaigrette (No. 1660); then drain. Put some veloute sauce (No. 415) reduced with mushroom liquor into a saucepan, add the trotters and some turned or channeled mushrooms (No. 118) previously cooked. Boil, season with salt and pepper, and thicken with egg-yolks diluted in cream, and just when ready to serve incorporate fresh butter, lemon juice and chopped parsley.

← No. 1658 Sheep's Tongues, Neapolitan Style Mutton No. 1660 Sheep's Trotters a la Vinaigrette →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already knows the base preparations, so this entry is really the last five minutes of a much longer job. The cross-references do the heavy lifting: No. 1660 covers cleaning and cooking the trotters, No. 415 is the velouté, No. 118 the turned mushrooms.

The hinge: never boil after the liaisonOnce the egg yolks and cream go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer — roughly 175-180F — and stirred until it coats. A single boil curdles the yolks and the sauce breaks into grains. The instruction to "boil" applies to the velouté and trotters before thickening, not after.
Sourcing the trottersSheep's feet are a special order from a halal butcher or a whole-animal supplier; they are rarely on display. Ask for them scalded and dehaired, and expect to singe off remaining hair yourself. Four to six feet is a portion for two to three people.
What No. 1660 involvesNo. 1660 is not reproduced here, so the detail has to be inferred. A vinaigrette preparation of trotters normally means boning or scraping the feet, soaking them in cold water, then cooking them for some hours in a blanc — water slackened with a flour-and-water paste, lemon juice, salt and fat — which keeps them pale and gelatinous rather than grey. Expect several hours, until the flesh slips from the bone.
Velouté in this bookNo. 415 is a white stock (veal or chicken) thickened with a pale roux and simmered long enough to skim clean. A well-made modern chicken velouté stands in directly. Reduce it with the mushroom cooking liquor until it just coats a spoon, since the trotters release more gelatine into it.
Turned mushrooms"Turned or channeled" describes two decorative trims: turning pares the cap to an even shape with a small knife, channelling cuts grooves into it. Cook them first in water with butter and lemon; that liquor is the mushroom liquor called for here. Whole small button mushrooms cooked the same way lose nothing but the ornament.
Quantities are left to judgmentNo amounts appear anywhere in the entry. For about a quart of velouté, three yolks slaked with a half-cup of cream is a standard liaison, and the finishing butter is two to three tablespoons whisked in off the heat.
À la pouletteThe finish — yolks, cream, butter, lemon, parsley — is the whole point of the name and should go in at the last possible moment. Ranhofer's own order is butter, then lemon juice, then parsley.

A Little History

À la poulette is a long-established French sauce name — a velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison and sharpened with lemon — and it attached itself early and stubbornly to gelatinous cuts: trotters, tripe, calf's head, mussels. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York across some three decades, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete working record of that kitchen, which is why sheep's feet sit in the mutton section between tongues and a vinaigrette dish: an American luxury restaurant of the 1890s still cooked the whole animal, and offal appeared on the same menus as game birds. The dish belongs to a class of preparations that turn long, cheap cooking into something rich — the feet contribute little but collagen and texture, and everything memorable comes from the sauce. Trotters largely vanished from restaurant menus in the English-speaking world over the twentieth century and have returned mainly through chefs deliberately reviving nose-to-tail cookery.