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Calves' Feet, Lyonnaise
Split three fresh calves' feet in two, then let soak in fresh water for an hour. Drain, place in a saucepan with three tablespoons flour, a gill vinegar, sliced carrot and onion, two sliced leeks, a sliced branch each celery and parsley, a sprig thyme, bay leaf, two cloves, teaspoon allspice and half tablespoon whole black pepper. Pour in three quarts water, season with a tablespoon salt, cover pan and let gently boil for one hour and forty-five minutes. Take up feet with a skimmer, drain on a cloth, dress on hot dish, pour a Lyonnaise sauce over and serve.
N. B. Calves' feet prepared as above can be served with various sauces, such as Bordelaise, Colbert, Piquante, Horseradish, Soubise, Finnoise, Creole, Madeira, Perigueux, Robert, Italienne, etc.
This is a two-part dish: the feet are first poached in a blanc, the flour-and-vinegar bath that keeps pale meats white, then sauced. Almost everything that can go wrong happens in the poaching.
- The flour and vinegar are not seasoningWhisk the three tablespoons of flour into a little cold water first, then stir it into the pot, or it will seize into lumps. This is the classic blanc: the flour clouds the liquid and helps shield the meat from the air, and the acid discourages discolouration, so the feet stay pale rather than dull.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. White wine vinegar or cider vinegar suits this better than malt.
- Sourcing the feetCalves' feet are a special order from a butcher and usually arrive already split and scalded. If they are not, they need scraping and singeing to remove hair before the hour-long soak.
- TimingOne hour forty-five minutes is the minimum. Feet vary a great deal in size, and full tenderness — the meat and skin yielding easily to a knife tip but the pieces still holding their shape — often takes two and a half hours. Test rather than trusting the clock.
- Keep it at a bare tremble"Gently boil" means a slow simmer with occasional lazy bubbles. A rolling boil breaks the feet apart and clouds the liquid.
- Lyonnaise sauceIn this period that means onions sweated in butter until soft, deglazed with white wine and vinegar, then finished with demi-glace or a well-reduced brown stock. Make it while the feet poach; it wants twenty minutes.
- Serve very hotCalves' feet are very gelatinous, and the juices and sauce stiffen quickly as they cool. Warm the platter thoroughly, sauce at the last moment, and do not let the dish stand.
- The cooking liquidStrained and chilled, with the fat lifted off, it will set to a jelly; but it is floury, well salted and sharp with vinegar, so it will be cloudy and is better used to enrich a braise or soup than for a clear aspic.
- YieldThree split feet make roughly four servings as a main course, though with a great deal of bone on each plate.
Calves' feet were a staple of the nineteenth-century kitchen less for their meat than for their gelatin — before commercial powdered gelatin became cheap and reliable, feet were boiled down for the jellies, blancmanges and aspics that a formal table required, and calf's-foot jelly was standard invalid food in Victorian sickrooms. Serving the feet themselves as a dish, poached in a blanc and sauced, belongs to the French repertoire of offal cookery that Filippini and his contemporaries brought to American hotel dining rooms. The long closing list of alternative sauces is characteristic of professional cookbooks of the era: the poaching method is the recipe, and the sauce is a variable chosen from the saucier's standing repertoire.