Calf's Feet Fricassee

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 contained the first curry recipes published in the United States, 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

• calf's feet
• 0.5 pint white gravy
• 1 spoonful white wine
• 1 spoonful lemon pickle
• to taste salt
• 1 teaspoonful curry powder
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 gill milk
• 1 large spoonful butter
• 2 spoonful white flour

Instructions

1. Boil the calf's feet until very tender. Cut them in two and pull out the large bones.
2. Have half a pint of good white gravy and add to it one spoonful of white wine, one spoonful of lemon pickle, salt to taste, and one teaspoonful of curry powder.
3. Stew the feet in this mixture for fifteen minutes.
4. Prepare the thickening: mix together the yolks of two eggs, a gill of milk, a large spoonful of butter, and two spoonfuls of white flour until very smooth.
5. Stir the thickening into the stew and shake the pan over the fire a few minutes, but do not let it boil lest the eggs and milk should curdle.