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Mutton Feet, Poulette
Scald twenty-four fresh mutton feet in boiling water for five minutes and drain. If any vestige of wool adheres to them carefully remove it. Place in a saucepan, add two branches parsley, a branch chervil, half a lemon, a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and enough water to cover, cover pan and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain feet on a sieve and keep the broth, remove principal bones of each and keep feet warm. Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter with two tablespoons flour, heat for a half minute, then pour in mutton broth and mix well with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil. Add a teaspoon finely chopped chives, mix well, and let boil for ten minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with half gill cream, add to sauce and sharply mix while heating for three minutes. Add feet to sauce, lightly mix, then heat without boiling for two minutes, pour into a deep dish and serve.
A classic French à la poulette treatment — white sauce finished with an egg-and-cream liaison — applied to sheep's trotters. Two things need attention: the cooking time and the liaison.
- Twenty-five minutes is not enoughTrotters are almost entirely collagen and tendon, and they need long, slow simmering to turn gelatinous and tender — three to four hours at a bare simmer is normal practice. Why the book allows only twenty-five minutes is unclear; possibly the feet were expected to arrive part-cooked. Judge by feel: the flesh should slip readily from the remaining bones.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inOnce the diluted yolks are stirred into the sauce, keep it below a simmer. Boiling scrambles the yolk and the sauce breaks into grains. The three minutes of heating is enough to thicken it.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz). Heavy cream is the right choice; the fat helps stabilise the yolks.
- Sourcing and cleaningSheep's trotters are sold by halal and Caribbean butchers and by some traditional butchers on request, usually already scalded and scraped. The instruction about lingering wool assumes feet straight from the slaughterhouse; if yours still have hair, singe it off over a flame rather than picking.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh outside farmers' markets. A little flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gives a close approximation of its faint anise note; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- Keep the broth reducedAfter a long simmer the cooking liquid will be strongly gelatinous — strain it, skim the fat, and add it to the roux of 1 1/2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour by eye, stopping when the sauce coats the spoon. If the liquid tastes thin, reduce it before saucing; it is the whole flavour of the dish.
- FinishingA squeeze of lemon off the heat sharpens the sauce, which is otherwise very rich. Plain boiled potatoes or rice will absorb it.
- YieldTwenty-four feet is a substantial dish, serving six to eight as a main course. The proportions scale down cleanly; six feet with a half-cup of sauce feeds two.
À la poulette is one of the old French white sauces — velouté enriched with egg yolks, cream, lemon and chopped herbs — and it was the standard dressing for pale, gelatinous, mild-flavoured things: mussels, calf's head, tripe, sweetbreads, and sheep's trotters. Trotters were cheap protein in nineteenth-century France and Britain alike, sold cooked from stalls and barrows, and the poulette treatment was the restaurant version of a street food. Their appeal is textural rather than meaty: the collagen dissolves into gelatin, giving a soft, faintly sticky richness that the acidulated sauce cuts. Offal of this kind was still a normal part of what a well-trained cook was expected to know.