{"id":3730,"date":"2026-03-16T15:21:22","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T15:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianregency.com\/blog\/?p=3730"},"modified":"2026-03-16T15:21:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T15:21:22","slug":"what-on-earth-is-calfs-foot-jelly-by-susan-karsten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/16\/what-on-earth-is-calfs-foot-jelly-by-susan-karsten\/","title":{"rendered":"What on Earth is Calf’s Foot Jelly? by Susan Karsten"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Calf's<\/p>\n

If you’ve done a significant amount of reading of regency fiction, you’ve come across a female character taking calf’s foot jelly to an invalid, usually someone poor. It was thought to be exceeding nutritious, but that is not necessarily\u00a0true, according to my research. It was a thrifty, economizing concoction, made from a leftover part of a beef.<\/p>

\"Fire<\/a><\/div>\n

Calf’s foot jelly has two forms: sweet, common in 19th-century Britain and America,\u00a0and savoury–called\u00a0petcha<\/em>, a standard of Ashkenazi Jewish cooking. Both dishes start with a long braise of split cow’s feet. The latter<\/span> (for\u00a0a sickroom concoction) adds garlic, onion, salt and pepper, and usually retains the meat that falls from the feet; the former<\/span>\u00a0(for a dessert) adds sugar, Madeira wine, brandy, cinnamon and citrus, and discards the meat. In both cases the stock is chilled until it sets, and the fat that rises to the top is skimmed.<\/p>\n

The key component of both is collagen–a protein found mainly in connective tissue, in which feet abound. Collagen makes meat tough, but it also makes the same cut, after stewing, silky and rich. Smart cooks have long begged chicken feet from the butcher: they give chicken soup extra body. Hot, collagen imparts richness; chilled, it turns to gelatin.<\/p>\n

To boil it down\/summarize:\u00a0<\/span>Stock made by boiling a calf’s foot in water; which sets to a stiff jelly on cooling. It consists largely of water and gelatin, so is of little nutritional\u00a0<\/span>value<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note: The\u00a0New Female Instructor<\/i>\u00a0strongly advises against the addition of wine when the jelly is to be used for an ill person. Lemonade was often given to an ill-person along with barley water and tea.<\/p>\n

To the readers, have you come across this, and wondered? To the fellow-Regency writers, have you ever included a character delivering this to a poor sick person?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"104_2304\"<\/a>Susan Karsten, regency blogger, author<\/p>\n

Originally posted 2014-05-22 09:00:00. <\/small><\/p>

\"Listen<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve done a significant amount of reading of regency fiction, you’ve come across a female character taking calf’s foot jelly to an invalid, usually someone poor. It was thought to be exceeding nutritious, but that is not necessarily\u00a0true, according to my research. It was a thrifty, economizing concoction, made from a leftover part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,196,3,1],"tags":[571,376,577,207,113,39,29,78,417,209,50],"class_list":["post-3730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-health","category-history","category-uncategorized","tag-books","tag-christian-fiction","tag-food","tag-inspirational-regency","tag-recipe","tag-regency","tag-regency-england","tag-regency-history","tag-remedies","tag-susan-karsten","tag-writing-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3730"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4007,"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3730\/revisions\/4007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vanessariley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}