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Lambs' Feet, Poulette
Plunge twenty-four lambs' feet in boiling water for five minutes, drain on a sieve, carefully remove all the wool adhering to them and thoroughly clean them. Place in a stone pot, add one quart and a half water, one-half gill white wine, two tablespoons vinegar, an onion with two cloves stuck in it, half a sound lemon and one small branch parsley. Season with teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, lightly mix, cover the pan and let boil thirty minutes. Mix in a saucepan an ounce of butter with one and a half ounces flour. Strain the feet broth through a cheesecloth into this pan, mix well until it comes to a boil, add ten finely sliced, canned mushrooms, half a teaspoon chopped chives and half a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, then let boil fifteen minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with two tablespoons cream, add to the sauce. Sharply mix while heating two minutes. Place the feet in the sauce, shuffle a little, transfer into a deep hot dish and serve.
A French bistro preparation of lamb's trotters in a velouté finished with egg yolk. Most of the work is in the sourcing and the cooking time, and the original understates both.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolks go inOnce the diluted yolks are stirred into the sauce, keep it below a simmer — around 180F — or it will curdle into scrambled egg. Two minutes over gentle heat, stirring hard, is exactly right, and the sauce should not return to the pan's boiling point afterwards.
- Thirty minutes is nowhere near enoughTrotters are collagen and cartilage on bone. Thirty minutes leaves them rubbery and clinging; they need three to four hours at a bare simmer, or about an hour at pressure, until the meat and skin yield to a fork. Filippini may have assumed feet already part-cooked or partly prepared by the butcher.
- Buying them nowLamb's feet are a special order from a halal or Greek butcher, and they often arrive scalded, scraped and singed, in which case the five-minute plunge and the wool-picking are no longer your job. Twenty-four feet is roughly 8-10 lb and serves six to eight as a main course.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon: three saltspoons of pepper is 3/4 teaspoon, half a saltspoon of nutmeg is a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- The stone potA glazed earthenware crock. Acid from the vinegar and lemon attacks untinned copper and bare cast iron, which is the likely reason for specifying stoneware. Any nonreactive pot — stainless or enameled cast iron — does the same job.
- The roux and the brothAn ounce of butter to an ounce and a half of flour is a fairly dry roux; cook it a minute or two without color before straining the hot broth in. Add the liquid gradually and whisk, or it will lump. Expect to reduce the strained broth if you have simmered the feet for the full several hours.
- Canned mushroomsCanned button mushrooms were typically packed in brine and tend to be firm and a little acidic. Fresh buttons, sliced and sweated in butter first, give a better result; drain them before they go into the sauce so they do not thin it.
- Finish and servePoulette sauce is conventionally sharpened with a squeeze of lemon at the end, which this version leaves to the lemon in the cooking liquid. Taste before serving and correct with lemon and salt. Serve in a deep, genuinely hot dish — the sauce sets quickly as the gelatin cools.
À la poulette is one of the old French sauce derivatives: a velouté made from the cooking liquor of whatever is being cooked, thickened again with egg yolks and cream and sharpened with lemon. The name has nothing to do with chicken in the finished dish — it is generally traced to the sauce's pale, yolk-enriched color rather than to any poultry in the pot. It was a standard treatment for mild, gelatinous, faintly awkward things: mussels, sweetbreads, tripe, and above all feet. Pieds de mouton à la poulette was a Paris bouillon and bistro dish, cheap protein turned respectable by an expensive-tasting sauce. Alexander Filippini was a Delmonico's man writing for American households. The dish also marks a moment in the meat trade: the cook here bought feet still bearing wool and was expected to clean them, a step that has since largely passed to the butcher.