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Pig's Feet Salad
Wash thoroughly four pig's feet, cover with cold water, bring slowly to the boiling point, drain and drop in a bowl of cold water; let stand for half an hour, put into a clean saucepan with two quarts of water, one teaspoonful of salt and one teaspoonful of vinegar, heat slowly and simmer for four hours until very tender; when cold, remove the meat, cut into small pieces, marinate with a French dressing and put aside for an hour or more. Serve on a bed of lettuce or chicory, sprinkle with one teaspoonful of finely chopped chives and pass mayonnaise in a separate dish.
A cold pork salad built on a long, gentle simmer. The technique is sound; only the shopping and the timing need translation.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerFour hours at a true boil will shred the feet and cloud the liquid into glue. Hold it just below a simmer, with the surface barely moving, until the skin yields to a fork and the bones slip free.
- Why the first boil is thrown awayBringing the feet to a boil and dropping them into cold water is a blanch: it firms the skin and removes scum and blood so the second cooking stays clean. Do not skip it, and do not save that first water.
- Buying the feetAsk a butcher for hind feet, split lengthwise — supermarket pork often does not include them, but Latin American, Chinese and Eastern European markets stock them frozen. Four feet will run somewhere around 3 to 5 lb and yield perhaps a pound of picked meat and skin.
- Pressure cookerAn electric or stovetop pressure cooker does the same job in about 60 to 75 minutes at high pressure, with the same salt and vinegar in the water. Let the pressure fall naturally so the meat is not torn apart.
- Pick the meat while warmThe recipe says to bone them cold, but the gelatin sets hard and the pieces tear. Cool until you can handle them, then pick — the skin, tendon and lean all go in, cut to about half-inch pieces.
- "French dressing"In American cookbooks of this period the term means a plain vinaigrette, not the sweet orange bottled kind: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper. Toss the still-slightly-warm meat in it so the dressing is absorbed, then chill an hour.
- ChicoryHere it means curly endive or escarole rather than Belgian endive. Its bitterness is the point — it offsets the richness of the gelatinous meat.
- MayonnaisePassed separately, as the book says, so the vinaigrette-dressed meat is not smothered. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, since it is served without further cooking.
- YieldServes four as a first course, or two as a lunch dish. It keeps two or three days refrigerated, though the dressing will set solid and needs to stand at room temperature before serving.
Pig's feet were cheap, abundant and full of gelatin, and nineteenth-century American cookery used them hard " p, boiled into souse and head cheese, or breaded and broiled. Turning them into a dressed salad on lettuce belongs to a slightly later moment: by the 1890s and 1900s, salads had expanded well past greens to include cold cooked meat, fish and vegetables bound with vinaigrette or mayonnaise. The two-stage cooking lblanch, discard the water, then simmer with salt and a little vinegar " ss standard old-school practice for trotters, and the vinegar is often said to do double duty, brightening the flavor and helping the collagen break down.