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Stuffed Pigs Feet, St. Menehould
Place seven raw pig's feet in saucepan with a sliced each carrot and onion, six sliced shallots, two branches parsley, a branch chervil, sprig each thyme and marjoram, a blade mace, two bay leaves and a clove. Pour in a pint white wine and enough broth to cover, season with a good teaspoon each salt and freshly crushed black pepper, cover pan and let slowly boil for two hours. Remove to table, let cool in broth, take up feet and split open six (only) without separating. Carefully remove bones and lay on a table, pick meat off other foot, finely chop, place in a bowl, with meat of three country sausages, a truffle cut in small squares, an egg yolk, a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, two tablespoons bread crumbs, a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Mix all well together, evenly spread force over the six boned feet, fold up and give them their previous shape. Lightly dip them in beaten eggs, roll in fresh bread crumbs, arrange on double broiler and broil on a slow fire for eight minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a very hot dish, spread a maitre d'hotel butter over and serve.
A classic French grill dish written for a professional kitchen: the feet are braised, boned, stuffed with their own meat, crumbed and grilled. Two things in the original need adjusting for a home cook -- the braising time and the doneness of the raw sausage in the stuffing.
- Braise much longer than two hoursTwo hours will not make pig's feet tender enough to bone cleanly; count on 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, until the skin yields easily and the bones slip free. Cooling them in the broth, as directed, is essential -- warm trotters tear when you open them.
- The stuffing must reach 160FThe forcemeat contains raw sausage meat and a raw egg yolk. Eight minutes a side over a slow fire may brown the crumbs long before the centre is cooked; check with an instant-read thermometer and grill until the stuffing registers 160F, lowering the heat or moving to indirect heat if the crust colours too fast.
- "Slow fire" and the double broilerA double broiler is a hinged wire grill basket that lets you turn the whole parcel without it falling apart -- a fish basket does the same job. "Slow fire" means moderate, not fierce: about medium on a grill, or the lower rack under a broiler set to medium.
- Old measuresA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. A pint of white wine is 2 cups. A blade of mace is one piece of the dried aril; a scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes.
- Country sausagesThe recipe gives no size, so judge by volume: fresh, coarse, seasoned pork sausage meat, enough to balance the meat picked from one foot (roughly half a pound is a reasonable reading). Bulk fresh sausage meat is the direct equivalent; skip any pre-cooked or smoked sausage, which will not bind.
- TruffleA fresh black truffle is optional rather than structural here. A tablespoon of chopped rehydrated dried mushroom, or a few drops of truffle-scented oil stirred into the crumbs, keeps the aromatic register without the cost.
- "Force"Shorthand for forcemeat -- the chopped stuffing. Spread it thinly and evenly, then fold the split foot back into its original shape and tie or wrap it in caul fat or a double layer of foil for the first minutes on the grill if it threatens to open.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter beaten with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled and sliced. Put it on at the table, off the heat, so it melts rather than breaks.
- YieldSix stuffed feet, one per person, though they are rich enough to serve two people each with a sharp salad and bread. The seventh foot exists only to be picked for the stuffing.
The name points to Sainte-Menehould in the Marne, in Champagne, whose long-simmered breadcrumbed pig's trotters are the town's best-known dish; the traditional account is that the feet are cooked so long -- historically many hours, sometimes over more than one day -- that even the small bones become edible, and are then crumbed and grilled to a crust. This version takes a different route to the same effect, boning the feet and rebuilding them around a forcemeat; a stuffed, reshaped trotter is easier to serve and eat than a whole one. The dish also belongs to the older economy of using the whole pig, in which trotters -- mostly skin, gelatin and connective tissue -- were transformed by patient cooking rather than discarded.