Skip to main content
Main

Pigs' Feet Soup

A hearty soup made with pigs' feet, ears, vegetables, herbs, and a spiced broth thickened with rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Pigs' Feet Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Bring 5 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot. Skim the surface.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt, 2 chopped onions, 1 chopped head of celery, 2 chopped carrots, a bunch of herbs, 1 teaspoon white peppercorns, and 1 blade of mace to the pot.

  3. Simmer until the pigs' feet and ears are tender. Remove them and keep the broth simmering.

  4. Bone the pigs' feet and return the bones to the broth. Simmer gently for 1 hour.

  5. Strain the broth into a clean pot and let it cool overnight.

Prepare the meat

  1. While warm, cut the meat into dice and cover it with a cloth.

Make the soup

  1. Skim off any fat from the broth. In a clean pot, bring the broth to a boil.

  2. Mix 6 ounces rice flour with ¼ teaspoon cayenne and ¾ teaspoon mace. Stir this mixture into the boiling broth.

  3. Add the juice of 1 lemon, 3 tablespoons Harvey's sauce, and ½ pint sherry or Madeira.

  4. Simmer for 6 to 8 minutes, stirring often. Adjust salt to taste.

  5. Add the diced meat and herbs, and simmer gently for 5 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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pigs' feet
Give gelatin and body to the broth as they simmer and release collagen.
Rice flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth, light body when stirred into it while boiling.
Sherry or madeira
Adds aromatic depth and a rounded sweetness to the finished soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich broth and balances its fattiness.

The step that matters

Stirring the rice flour into the boiling broth. Starch added to hot liquid can clump if not whisked in well; stirring while the broth boils disperses the flour so it thickens evenly rather than forming lumps.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, carrot, rice, flour, pepper, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, carrot, rice, flour, pepper, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipes