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Boiled Pigs' Feet

Boiled pig's feet served with a vinegar, onion, parsley, caper, mustard, and oil sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Pigs' Feet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the feet

  1. Wrap each cleaned foot in coarse cotton cloth and secure with string.

  2. Cover the wrapped feet in boiling water with 1 tablespoon of vinegar.

  3. Cook the wrapped feet for 4 hours.

  4. Let the feet cool in the water.

  5. Unroll the feet and place them on a dish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat 4 tablespoons of vinegar with minced onion, parsley, capers, salt, pepper, and mustard.

  2. Simmer the sauce for 3 minutes.

  3. Slowly beat in 4 tablespoons of oil until creamy.

  4. Set the sauce in boiling water until hot.

Serve

  1. Pour the hot sauce over the feet.

  2. Cover and steam the feet over boiling water for 10 minutes before serving.

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. Capers + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigs' feet
Provide the main body of the dish, with gelatinous skin and connective tissue that become tender during long cooking.
Oil
Emulsifies with the vinegar to give the sauce a creamy, smooth body.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the rich meat and the oil in the sauce.
Capers
Add a briny, sharp flavour that cuts through the richness of the feet and oil.

The step that matters

Slowly beat in the oil. Adding oil gradually while beating lets it disperse into the vinegar as tiny droplets, forming a stable emulsion. Pouring it in quickly can cause the sauce to separate and look greasy rather than creamy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sauce, parsley, capers, pepper, mustard):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sauce, parsley, capers, pepper, mustard. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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