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Pig's Feet for Breakfast

A boiled and grilled pig's feet dish served for breakfast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Pig's Feet for Breakfast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the pig's feet in boiling water and scrape off any hairs.

  2. Place the feet in a saucepan and cover with cold water.

  3. Add the onion, carrot, salt, peppercorns, and bay leaf.

  4. Simmer gently until the bones can be easily removed, nearly all day.

  5. Split each foot in half and bone them.

  6. Let them cool.

Coat and brown

  1. Melt butter on a plate.

  2. Dip each half in the melted butter.

  3. Cover each half with dry bread crumbs.

  4. Place the feet on a gridiron over a low fire.

  5. Turn occasionally until hot and browned.

Serve

  1. Serve neatly arranged on a dish with a napkin.

  2. Garnish with parsley.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pig's feet
Provide gelatinous connective tissue that becomes tender during long simmering and sets texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the bread crumbs brown on the surface.
Dry bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned outer crust when heated over the fire.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the bones can be easily removed. Boiling rather than gently simmering can toughen meat and break the feet apart. Slow, low heat slowly converts collagen into gelatin, so the meat becomes tender and the bones release cleanly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, butter, bread, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, butter, bread, parsley. 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.

More pig's feet recipes

Pickled 17Fried 11Boiled 8Stew 8Soused 8Jelly 7 See all 12 →

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