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Pigs' Feet in Jelly (Thoroughly scrape and clean)
Thoroughly scrape and clean one dozen pigs' feet.
Place them in a kettle, cover with boiling water, add one tablespoonful of salt and simmer steadily until tender. Transfer the feet to a stone crock, placing between them thin slices of onion. Heat and boil together for five minutes two quarts of vinegar (not too strong), two tablespoonfuls of sugar, one dozen whole cloves, six tiny red peppers and one-half teaspoonful of salt. Add one quart of boiling water and pour at once over the pigs' feet. Cover and let stand two days before using.
A straightforward pickle: the feet are simmered until their collagen softens, then held in a spiced vinegar that sets to jelly as it cools. Two details matter most — how long the simmer runs, and where the crock sits while it stands.
- Keep it cold while it standsThe two-day rest was meant for a cool cellar or larder. Cooked meat in a diluted vinegar brine at room temperature is not something to attempt now; refrigerate the covered crock for the full two days and keep it refrigerated afterward, using the feet within about a week.
- Simmer time"Until tender" is the recipe's only guide; for a dozen feet expect something in the region of two to four hours at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil. The meat should pull from the bone easily but the feet should still hold together for slicing.
- "Not too strong" vinegarHousehold vinegar of the period varied in strength, which is presumably why the recipe qualifies it. Standard cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the modern equivalent; the recipe's added quart of water dilutes it further, which is part of why cold storage is essential.
- Stone crockAny nonreactive vessel does — glass, glazed stoneware, or food-grade plastic. Do not use aluminium, copper or bare cast iron, which the vinegar will attack and discolour.
- Tiny red peppersThese are small whole dried chiles, roughly what is sold now as pequin, chile de árbol or bird pepper. Six of them in three quarts of liquid gives warmth rather than heat; adjust by count, not by substituting ground cayenne.
- The jellyNo gelatin is added. Pigs' feet are almost entirely skin, cartilage and connective tissue, and enough gelatin clings to them to thicken the brine as it chills, though the set will be soft rather than firm since the gelatinous cooking liquor is not carried over.
- Yield and servingA dozen feet is a large batch, enough for a dozen or more servings. The recipe itself gives no serving direction beyond letting the feet stand two days before using; they can be served whole and cold, or the meat picked from the bone with a little of the jelly and the pickled onion.
Pickled pigs' feet belong to the long tradition of thrift butchery, in which nothing from the hog was wasted and the least promising cuts were made palatable by long cooking and a sharp preserving liquid. The same logic produced souse and head cheese, both of which rely on the natural gelatin in trotters, ears and skin to set a cold loaf without any added thickener. Older cookbooks tend to treat the dish as ordinary provision food rather than a delicacy, and jars of pickled feet were a standing fixture on American saloon and lunch-counter shelves through the early twentieth century. The whole cloves, sugar and red pepper here are the sort of sweet-and-sharp spicing associated with other pickled and spiced meats.