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To Stew Pigs' Feet

A stew of boiled pigs' feet simmered in gravy with onion, sage, spices, and lemon pickle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Stew Pigs' Feet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the pigs' feet well and boil them until tender.

Stew

  1. Brown some butter with flour and add it to enough gravy or water to stew the feet.

  2. Season with minced onion, sage leaves, coarse sea salt, black pepper, and Jamaica pepper.

  3. Cut the feet in half, add them to the pan, and cover it closely.

  4. Let them stew for 30 minutes.

  5. A little before serving, mix in lemon pickle or vinegar and remove the sage leaves.

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. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Pigs' feet
Provide the main body of the dish, with gelatin from the skin and connective tissue that thickens the stew.
Butter
Browned with flour to add rich, nutty flavour to the stewing liquid.
Flour
Browned in butter and stirred into the liquid to help thicken the gravy.
Lemon pickle or vinegar
Adds acidity at the end to brighten and balance the rich, fatty stew.

The step that matters

Cover closely while stewing. A tight lid traps steam so the liquid stays near a gentle simmer and the connective tissue in the feet can slowly break down into gelatin, keeping the meat tender and the gravy moist rather than drying out or reducing too far.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, sage, pepper, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sage, 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.

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