Calf's Feet Fricassee

Source: Mary Randolph, 1824

History

This fricassee is preserved in Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife (1824), regarded as the first regional American cookbook. As printed, the method is spare: boil calf's feet 'till very tender, cut them in two and pull out the large bones,' then stew them fifteen minutes in half a pint of white gravy sharpened with white wine, lemon pickle, salt, and 'a tea-spoonful of curry powder,' thickened at the end with egg yolks, milk, butter and flour and kept from boiling 'lest the eggs and milk should curdle'. Calf's feet were a familiar ingredient of 18th-century English cookery — calf's foot jelly was 'a popular dish of that era'. The curry powder is telling: The Virginia House-Wife is commonly cited as the first American cookbook to print curry receipts — it gives both a curry powder and a curry of catfish, and no curry appears in Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery of 1796 — part of a taste for curry that had reached Anglo-American kitchens through English cookbooks after Hannah Glasse printed 'the first known English-written curry recipe' in 1747; the book supplies its own curry-powder recipe, so this dish applies a spice blend the same volume defines. Beyond this, the record is silent on an inventor, a court or region of origin, or who ate it and what it signified socially.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Boil the feet till very tender, cut them in two, and pull out the large bones.
  2. Have half a pint of good white gravy. Add to it a spoonful of white wine, one of lemon pickle, some salt, and a tea-spoonful of curry powder.
  3. Stew the feet in it fifteen minutes.
  4. Thicken it with the yelks of two eggs, a gill of milk, a large spoonful of butter, and two of white flour; let the thickening be very smooth.
  5. Shake the stew pan over the fire a few minutes, but do not let it boil, lest the eggs and milk should curdle.

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