No. 373

Chicken and Calf's Foot Jelly

Gelee de Volaille et de Pieds de Veau

Bone six calves' feet, blanch, and refresh them in cold water; put them in a saucepan with six pounds of round bottom of veal, four large fowls, after removing the breasts, two knuckles of veal and sixteen quarts of water. Boil, then skim, and season with salt and pepper, adding a bunch of parsley, garnished with thyme, bay leaf, and two cloves of garlic, a little celery, three onions, one having two cloves in it, four carrots, and eight leeks; boil constantly until perfectly cooked from six to eight hours, and test the jelly to see whether it be firm enough, by putting a little on a plate on ice; if too gelatinous, then add a little water. Strain through a fine sieve, and remove the fat.

For Clarification.—Chop fine the chicken breasts, mix in with eight egg-whites, diluted with a little white broth, or half a bottleful of white wine; mix in the jelly gradually with the eggs, and put it back on the fire, stirring it constantly with a whisk, and when on the point of boiling remove it from the range, and strain through a flannel bag, restraining until it flows clear.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a restaurant-scale consommé set with natural gelatin, written for a kitchen that fed hundreds and kept an ice room. Everything about it works at one-eighth scale in a domestic pot; the technique is unchanged.

The hinge: never let it boil after the egg whites go inOnce the chopped breast meat and whites are stirred through, the pot must be brought up slowly and pulled the instant it trembles. A boil breaks the raft apart and drives the coagulated protein back through the liquid, and no amount of straining will make it clear again.
Scale it down by eightAs written this starts with 16 quarts of water, and after six to eight hours' boiling the finished jelly will be a good deal less than that; the book gives no yield. One calf's foot, a pound of veal shin, half a chicken, and two quarts of water is an eighth of the original and enough for a household.
Calves' feetOrder them from a halal or Latin American butcher, or a good traditional shop, usually split lengthwise. They are the entire point of the recipe: the collagen in the feet and knuckles is what sets the jelly, and powdered gelatin gives a slick, bouncy texture rather than the tender melting set this produces.
Blanch and refreshCover the feet with cold water, bring to a boil for five minutes, then drop them into cold water and scrub off the grey scum. Skipping this step is a common cause of cloudy stock that clarification will not fully rescue.
"Boil constantly" means a bare simmerRanhofer's kitchen worked over coal ranges where the back of the stove ran at a shiver. Hold it at about 185F, with the surface barely moving, for six to eight hours. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and turns the stock permanently murky.
The plate testA spoonful chilled on a cold saucer for a few minutes should set to a soft, wobbling jelly that holds a fingerprint. Too stiff, add water; too loose, keep reducing. Judge it before clarifying, not after.
Removing the fatChill the strained stock overnight and lift the solid cap off in one piece. Wipe the surface with a paper towel dipped in hot water to take the last film, since any fat left behind will keep the jelly from setting clean.
The flannel bagA doubled square of undyed flannel, or a modern jelly bag, wetted and wrung out first. "Restraining until it flows clear" means pouring the first cloudy run back through the same bag, which by then has a filter cake of egg on it and will catch far more.
Season for coldChilled jelly reads bland. Taste and correct the salt at the very end of clarification, when it is still hot but already clear, and aim a little higher than seems right at that temperature.
Keeping itThis is unpreserved cooked poultry and veal in water. Refrigerate, use within three or four days, and bring any leftover back to a full boil before setting it again.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) recorded thirty-odd years of cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its section of broths and jellies for invalids reflects a nineteenth-century conviction that concentrated meat essence was the proper food for the sick and the convalescent. Clear jellies were prized because they were thought digestible, because they could be taken cold by someone with no appetite, and because a firm, brilliant consommé aspic was among the hardest things a kitchen could produce — a stock like this doubled as the base for the elaborate cold chaud-froid and moulded dishes of the buffet. The reliance on calves' feet is older than the book by centuries: before commercial gelatin was cheap and reliable, feet, knuckles and pork rind were how any cook got a set, and English and French household manuals alike gave long instructions for boiling them down. Note also the economy of the thing, characteristic of a large professional brigade — the four fowls are used breastless, the breasts held back and chopped raw to clarify the very stock their carcasses helped build.