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Fried Pigs' Feet

Fried pig feet coated in a flour batter and served with butter and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Pigs' Feet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Make a batter with flour, water, and a little coarse sea salt.

Fry

  1. Dip the pigs' feet into the batter to cover them.

  2. Heat the fat until hot and fry the feet until they are quite brown.

Serve

  1. Prepare drawn butter.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of vinegar to serve with the fried feet.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Flour + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the batter coating that crisps and browns around the feet when fried.
Butter
Provides fat and rich flavor in the drawn butter served alongside the feet.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that cuts through the rich, fried coating and fat.

The step that matters

Frying the coated feet until quite brown. The fat must be hot before the battered feet go in. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisp, and the browning that gives flavor is delayed.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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