Nose To Tail At Home

Welcome to the fifth guest post!  I’m letting anyone who wants to show off an offal dish submit a post with pictures.  Want to show the world that chicken feet can’t be beat?  Are you terrific with tongue?  Let me know and we’ll post your hard work here!  This guest post comes from Katrina Kollegaeva, and the post originally showed up on her website Around the world in 80 markets, and more.

Aren’t they fun?! A test to an omnivore kinda dish, I say. Yes, not only did I buy these pink creatures quite on purpose (the all organic tootsies of a – hopefully! – happy piggy), but I cleaned them, boiled them until no more, dismantle them and put them all together into a glorious Soviet grandmotherly dish of kholodets, pork in aspic, or – more familiar to you perhaps – a ham and chicken terrine.

The origin

The name Kholodets stems from a Russian word meaning cold, frozen or chilled. The dish basically consists of shredded boiled meat (which can be anything from chicken to beef or even rabbit), jellified by the means of pork stock that is made out of glorious pig trotters (the bones and other tissue in the feet make the liquid go jelly-like when chilled. In fact – read closely, my vegetarian friends – all jelly like treats are made with at least some use of a pig essence).

I believe the recipe had its roots in the Fresh obsession with everything jellied in the 18-19 centuries (and Russians were bonkers about all things Frenchy). The wobbly and transparent texture of the dish signified something bizarrely sophisticated and – yes – fun to the masses. Later on, after the Soviet revolution, kholodets could be found in any canteen and kitchen throughout the Communist kingdom; particularly popular during long, celebratory banquets; such as the most important New Year’s eve.

My kholodets childhood

I’d been dreaming of re-creating this dish of my childhood for years, battling the seeming impossibility of sourcing the named tootsies from my local butchers (I found them eventually through the Real Meat Company). I always remember the long evenings at home, in our kitchen, with my mum slowly going through buckets of just-boiled meat, carefully separating the edible tasty bits from not so. She was using all the possible plates, cups, bowls and saucers in our house to make the little individual portions of kholodets – a bit of meat on the bottom of a plate, some crushed garlic, and stock on top – that gets jellified in the fridge for the next 12-24 hours.

My mum almost always used chicken meat and put lots of garlic, so the result was incredibly tender, delicate and flavoursome. We ate out little kholodets (ki?) out of the same bowls where it’d been chilling, with some nose-bitingly Russian mustard or grated horseradish and, of course, slices of black Russian rye bread.

And now..

Well, I repeated the experiment the other night, freakily enjoying the sweet and meaty smell of chicken and trotters boiling my kitchen away for good four hours (take the trotters and some bony joints of a chicken, add cold water, a few spoons of vinegar, onion, carrots, lots of salt and crushed pepper). And this is the initial result:

I felt like a villain – a wonderful, life-affirming feeling!

You then pick the meat off the bones; and start layering pieces of pork and chicken meat into your little bowls, specks of garlic, some garlic out of the same stock and top up with the stock. Let it cool and keep in the fridge for at least overnight until your kholodets firms up and you see a thin white layer of fat on the top.

Voila!

Have your pig trotter concoction with some pickled cucumbers, some lovely fresh salad, some sourdough bread (home-made in my case, but this may be optional) and – an absolute requirement which was refused to me in my years of pioneer youth – a shot of very, very cold vodka.

Na zdaravye, tovarishi.

Thank you Katrina!