Offal?
Awful!
Pigs’
Trotters
It’s a freezing cold winter’s
day in Paris, 1973. Gégé’s decided to do a special hot, warming dish tonight!
He eyes me warily: is this gonna shock me because I’m an “Anglo-Saxonne?” He
half hopes it will, that’s only too horribly evident. “Pieds de porc aux
lentilles, Catherine!”
Aw, gee, I’m not shocked.
The result, after long, slow cooking which certainly
helps warm up the flat, is totally delicious: melting trotters, soft, earthy, incredibly
flavoursome lentils. Ooh, yum!
The recipe takes a long time to
cook, but it’s very easy. It’s a hearty dish, very suitable for a cold winter’s
day, as we had it in Paris all those years ago. We had it without vegetables,
but followed by a green salad. Salade de frisée is
ideal.
Warning: if you manage to source trotters
in Australia or New Zealand, make sure you clean them very carefully, snipping
off any discoloured pieces or bits that look as if they’ve got some sort of dye
on them. There may well be rust marks from the hooks used, too. Wash and dry
them before using.
Gérard’s Pieds de porc aux lentilles
4 pig’s trotters; 2 cups large brown lentils;
1 onion; 4 garlic cloves;
small bunch dried
thyme or 1 teaspoon thyme leaves;
3 tablespoons oil; salt and pepper
1. The lentils should be the large brown sort, of good quality (not
the small greenish sort often sold in Australia as brown and which are very,
very hard). Either soak them overnight in cold water or put them in a
well-sized pot with a lid, cover with plenty of water, bring to the boil, turn
off the heat and leave to soak for an hour with the lid on. Then drain well.
2. Wash and clean the trotters thoroughly.
3. Heat the oil in a deep saucepan and sauter the trotters, the onion,
roughly chopped, and the garlic, chopped, until lightly coloured all over. Add
the thyme and the drained lentils, pepper to taste, but NOT salt.
4. Cover with fresh water to about 2 cm above the level of the
mixture, bring to the boil and simmer gently till the meat is almost falling
off the bones and the lentils are soft. This takes at least 2 hours but may
well take longer. Check the pot periodically and top up the water if needed.
Lastly add salt to taste.
Serve as a main course, one trotter per person.
It could also be done
in the slow cooker (crock-pot), in which case set it to LOW and cook it for at
least 8 hours. If you leave it on for 10, it won’t suffer.
–Serves 4.
Back in the Antipodes I hardly
saw trotters for the next forty-plus years. They’d gone off the menu of the English-speaking
world. Even Jane Grigson in her English Food (Harmondsworth, England,
Penguin, 1977; first published London, Macmillan, 1974) ignores them.
This is part of the odd twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon
aversion to offal of all kinds (see also Offal?
Awful: Lily-Livered). But before that all parts of the pig were eaten: people
didn’t have hygienic supermarkets, and unless they were very rich they couldn’t
afford to be choosy. And in Britain, certainly since the Norman conquest, the
pig was a popular meat animal:
“Before 1066, beef, lamb,
mutton and goat were among the meats most likely to be served in England, but a
study of human and animal bones—as well as fat residue found on fragments of
cooking pots—found that pork and possibly chicken became much more popular
following the arrival of William the Conqueror.
“Experts
believe the Normans passed on their love of pork to local people, and pigs and
chickens began to be farmed much more intensively.”
(Steven Morris. “The 1066
diet: Normans passed on their love of pork, study suggests.” The
Guardian, Mon. 6 Jul 2020)
For hundreds of years, all parts of the animal
were consumed, as they still are in many parts of Europe to this day. There are
plenty of modern French recipes online for pigs’ tails and pigs’ ears, as well
as trotters. And the blood—you can see that the two women in the foreground of
the picture above are bleeding a pig—is still used for boudin, black
pudding.
Why
did things change so radically in the British culinary tradition? I don’t know:
I only know that they did. Perhaps it was the growth of the middle classes after
the War, as many families gradually became more affluent and, looking back, the
primness, prudishness and mealy-mouthedness of our working-class parents who
were now aspiring to gentility trickled over into what we ate. Odd bits of the animal,
which were traditionally cheap, were what poor people ate. If you were desperately
genteel, like Mum, whose father was a carpenter and sawmiller on the West Coast
of New Zealand’s South Island but whose mother was a prim little schoolmarm, at
most you might very occasionally buy half a well-cleaned pig’s head to make a
brawn. I can clearly remember her making it once, when we lived in Bayswater,
Auckland: so in the 1950s.
But we never had trotters. Feet were beyond
the Antipodean pale.
And they still are. In fact, in Australia
apparently they no longer exist! And here’s the poster that proves it:
There are lots of recipes in French online,
but very few from the British tradition. The BBC Food website notes: “The
pig’s gelatinous feet are considered a treat by many. Slow cooking (simmering
or roasting) them will result in tender, gelatinous morsels of meat. They're
also the magic ingredient that, when cooked slowly in a stock, will guarantee a
beautiful jelly for setting pies and terrines. Cheap as chips, many butchers
will be only too happy to sell you this often underrated cut. Although they
have enjoyed a slow revival in Britain, they’re still not as much of a
mainstream cut as they are in some other cultures.” How true. They don’t give any
recipes for trotters as such, only as secondary ingredients.
In the 19th
century British cooks weren’t afraid of offal of all kinds. Here’s Mrs Beeton’s
recipe for trotters (No. 832), which I can’t resist reproducing here because of
its charming name. You may well find it revolting, true. Just think of the ingredients
as meat.
PIG'S
PETTITOES.
INGREDIENTS.—A thin
slice of bacon, 1 onion, 1 blade of mace, 6 peppercorns, 3 or 4 sprigs of
thyme, 1 pint [600 ml] of gravy, pepper and salt to taste, thickening of butter
and flour. [PLUS pig’s liver, heart, and trotters]
Mode.—Put the liver, heart, and pettitoes
into a stewpan with the bacon, mace, peppercorns, thyme, onion, and gravy, and simmer
these gently for 1/4 hour; then take out the heart and liver, and mince them
very fine. Keep stewing the feet until quite tender, which will be in from 20
minutes to 1/2 hour, reckoning from the time that they boiled up first; then
put back the minced liver, thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour, season with pepper and salt, and simmer
over a gentle fire for 5 minutes, occasionally stirring the contents. Dish the mince,
split the feet, and arrange them round alternately with sippets of toasted
bread, and pour the gravy in the middle.
Time.—Altogether 40 minutes. Sufficient
for 3 or 4 persons. Seasonable from September to March.
(Isabella Beeton. The
Book of Household Management. [London], S.O. Beeton, 1861.)
When we’re thinking about typical foods that
have gone out of style since the 19th century we do need to remember that Mrs
Beeton, though she was writing for the genteel classes, most certainly didn’t produce
her book of household management for the upper strata of society. She includes a
lot of practical recipes, that she must have got off her own cook, that would be
served up for everyday family meals, for the children, or even for the relatively
small staff that a publisher’s home would have had. Many ingredients later
shunned by the “nice” English-speaking world appear in her book.
For a look at food considered suited to the
working classes, we can take a glance at A Plain Cookery Book For The
Working Classes (New ed., London, Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1852) by Charles
Elmé Francatelli (1805-1876). Francatelli was a posh
chef himself, his title page telling us that he’d been “chief cook to Her Majesty
the Queen”, but nevertheless his recipes for working people are pretty down to
earth and cheap. Thus he has both “Stewed Sheep’s Trotters” and “Pig’s Feet”,
the latter very short, just: “These are to be well salted for about four days,
and then boiled in plenty of water for about three hours; they may be eaten
either hot or cold.” The other recipe puts trotters firmly in their
sociological context: “Sheep's trotters are sold ready cleaned and very cheap
at all tripe shops.”
I thought
I might find more recipes in Escoffier, as pigs’ trotters have always been a
favourite in France, but I was wrong, he only had two, both for grilling. I should
have remembered that when Gégé served us his marvellous dish it struck me
forcibly that what ordinary people eat in France is not yer cordon blue
or anything like it!
Should you wish to serve trotters in your posh
restaurant, it’s quite acceptable to grill them. You may have them without truffles,
or with. (Cof.)
Here is M. Escoffier’s recipe for plain
grilled trotters in an English translation from the first decade of the 20th century:
PIEDS DE PORC PANÉS
Sprinkle
the pig’s trotters copiously with melted butter, and put them on the grill,
which should be very hot.
Grill
them very gently, turning them with care; and serve them plain, or with a
tomato purée separately.
(Auguste
Escoffier (1846-1935). A Guide to Modern Cookery. London, W. Heinemann,
1907)
This is still a popular method in France
and there are lots of modern French recipes for it online. Here’s what your grilled
trotter should look like:
The photo, taken in 2019, is from Brasserie
Georges in Lyon (by Sebleouf -
Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0).
I was
a bit doubtful about the grilling idea, because I’d only had trotters boiled slowly,
and I thought they might not cook through that way, but my brother, who’s seen
them done both ways in Europe, and has a scientific bent, assures me that the presence
of the bones helps the cooking process, because bones absorb heat. (Trotters
are full of little bones, the same as our own “pettitoes” are.)
Okay, if you’re starting to feel queasy
stop now! For those who can face them, here are a couple of modern recipes for serving
trotters as a main dish.
Many of the modern recipes in English are
Chinese-inspired. The Chinese, like the French, are much more sensible than the
British about different parts of the animal, and all parts of the pig are normal
in their cuisine.
If you’ve heard of the River Cottage
take on trotters, which is typical of the English-language offerings with a
Chinese flavour, it’s available on the NightChild site: “River Cottage’s
Chinese Style trotters”.
This New Zealand recipe belongs in the same
category. It’s the only recipe I found mid-2020 on the Eat Well website
for doing trotters as a hot meat dish. There were only 2 others for trotters, both
versions of brawn. And as you can see, this one kind of ameliorates the “feet”
idea by using hocks as well: they’re very meaty, whereas trotters are distinguished
by their gelatinous quality.
Star
anise will dominate a dish, so be a bit wary of the quantity used here:
Slow Cooked Pork Hock, Star Anise, Ginger and Green Chilli Sauce
For the pork
hock:
2 pork hocks, fresh, large; 2 pig trotters;
3 cinnamon sticks; 6 star anise;
3 red chillies, whole, fresh, chopped in
half’
5 cm fresh ginger, roughly sliced;
2/3 cup soy sauce; 1/4 cup soft brown sugar;
1/2 cup white vinegar; 1 Ltr water
For the
green chilli sauce:
5 cm fresh ginger, peeled and roughly
chopped;
1/4 cup white vinegar; 4 garlic cloves, peeled;
5 green
chillies, cut in half, seeds removed;
1-1/2 tsp caster sugar
1. Heat
oven to 200C.
2. Place
the hocks and trotters into a deep roasting tray with sides. Scatter spices,
chilli, ginger and garlic over the pork.
3. Add
the remaining ingredients and cover dish with baking paper and then foil
carefully sealing the sides.
4. Place
into oven and roast for 45 minutes before reducing the temperature to 160C and
continue to cook for another 1 ½ -2 hours or until
the pork easily falls away from the bone.
5. Remove
from oven, discard foil and paper. Allow to cool for 10 minutes before serving
with the cooking liquor, steamed Asian greens, jasmine rice and green chilli
sauce on the side.
6. To
make the green chilli sauce, place ginger, garlic and chillies in a food processor
and pulse until nearly smooth. Add vinegar and sugar and pulse briefly to
combine. Refrigerate until ready to use. Best eaten on the day.
–Serves 4.
(By Bevan
Smith, Bite, in Eat Well)
This last one is my translation of a very
easy French recipe that I thought was a bit different from most of them. It also
relies on long, slow cooking: about 4-1/2 hours in the oven. The author’s aim
was to make the trotters melt-in-the-mouth. She used a heavy cast-iron casserole.
Pied de porc
“Recette de pied de porc à l’ancienne”
2 pigs’ trotters; 3 onions;
3 carrots;
6 small
potatoes; 150 ml white wine;
1 teaspoon curry powder; salt and pepper
1. Peel
the onions and cut them into eighths.
2. Peel and
slice the carrots.
3. Scrub
and rinse the potatoes (preferably firm-textured red ones).
4. Clean
the trotters, washing in clean water.
5. Put
the onions and carrots in the bottom of a heavy cast-iron casserole.
6. Lay
the trotters on top of the vegetables.
7. Sprinkle
with curry powder, salt & pepper.
8. Place
the potatoes around and between the trotters.
9. Add
the white wine. And put the lid on.
10. Bake
in the oven at 150°C for 4 and a half hours.
11. Check
that the trotters are cooked, and adjust salt and pepper to taste.
–Serves
2.
Recommended
wines: Cabernet franc and Cabernet Sauvignon.
(Cuisine
Maison),
It’s
a lovely recipe, so why not give it a go if you’re lucky enough to locate some trotters?
Forget the “feet” thing. Try them!
