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Fried Pigs Feet
Preliminary treatment. Scrape the feet and wash them thoroughly, soak in cold water for two hours, then wash and scrape again. Split each in half lengthwise and tie the pieces separately in pieces of cheese cloth. Place in a deep sauce pan or kettle, cover with boiling water, add one tablespoonful of salt and simmer slowly until the feet are tender, usually about four hours. Take them from the liquor and set aside until cold. Remove the cloths. They are then ready to be finished in any way. For frying, season each piece with salt and pepper, dip into slightly beaten egg then into bread crumbs and fry golden brown in smoking hot fat Serve garnished with lemons and tufts of parsley.
A two-stage recipe: a long gentle simmer that turns collagen to gelatin, then a quick fry for crust. The original assumes you have bought raw, unsplit feet from a butcher and will do all the cleaning yourself.
- The hinge: chill them completelyThe instruction to "set aside until cold" is not a convenience. Warm pig's feet are slack and gelatinous and will fall apart in the fat; cold ones hold their shape and take breading cleanly. Refrigerate at least four hours, or overnight.
- SourcingAsk a butcher for fresh trotters, split lengthwise if they will do it, which saves you a cleaver and some effort. Many are sold already scraped and singed; check between the toes and around the dewclaws for bristle and scrape any that remains.
- The cheeseclothWrapping and tying each half keeps the skin and small bones together through four hours of simmering. Skip it and you will get a pan of loose bones. Wrap snugly but not tight enough to squeeze.
- "Simmer slowly"Bare tremble, around 190F, never a rolling boil, which shreds the skin. Four hours is realistic; test by pushing a skewer through the thick part, which should meet no resistance.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot fat" is a visual cue rather than a measurement; in practice it points to fat hot enough to brown quickly, somewhere in the region of 350-375F. Lard and drippings begin to smoke around there, while many modern neutral oils smoke higher, so a thermometer is more reliable than the appearance of the fat. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Save the liquorThe cooking water is heavily gelatinous stock. Strained and chilled, it sets firm and is the base for jellied pig's feet or a fortifier for other stocks.
- Seasoning the simmerOne tablespoon of salt in a kettle of water is light by current taste. A halved onion, bay, peppercorns and a splash of vinegar in the pot improve the result considerably and cut the richness.
- Yield and servingFigure one whole foot, that is two halves, per person as a main course. The lemon is functional rather than decorative; the meat is very fatty and wants the acid.
- Eating themThey are mostly skin, tendon and small bones with little muscle meat. Expect a sticky, unctuous texture rather than anything like a chop, and provide finger bowls or plenty of napkins.
Trotters were the classic thrift cut: cheap, plentiful wherever pigs were slaughtered, and rich in the collagen that gave cooks gelatin from the pot rather than from the shop, though by the turn of the century commercial granulated and leaf gelatin were available and not especially costly. The two-stage method here, long simmer then crumb and fry, is the standard nineteenth-century treatment and appears in English, French and American books alike, and is related to the French pieds de porc panés à la Sainte-Menehould, the breaded pig's foot being associated with Sainte-Menehould. Its appearance under "Sandwiches" in this book reflects how loosely turn-of-the-century American cookbooks organised their chapters. The preliminary soaking and double scraping tell you the reader was expected to buy the feet more or less as they came off the animal.