Every now and then I get homesick for Germany, and every now and then I cook something that we used to enjoy when we were poor. Today it’s pig’s feet.
(Remember the warning up there? :D)
Anyway, I have been boiling them for about 2 hours now, and the recipe called for a whole onion, a carrot and some spices. I didn’t have a whole carrot or onion, so I threw those feet in a pot, added some water, added some parsley, pepper-corns, minced onions, lemon pepper, basil leaves, thyme and oregano, and let that stuff start to cook.
Well, pretty soon things started smelling pretty good, but something was missing, and I decided it was vinegar, so hell, I poured in a couple of tablespoons of white and then realized I had some aged balsamic as well, so I added that too.
Then I got to thinking: Is all that shit gonna blow up on me, and is there a website that will caution you what not ingredients to mix together while cooking, just like there are websites that will tell you what medicines not to take together?
There is very little in cooking that cannot be safely mixed together. I have read many books on cooking, and though their are rules against undercooking certain things, using the wrong parts of certain vegitables. And rules about properly identifying any ingredients, and properly storing any ingredients. I have never seen saftey rules about mixing ingredients.
There are a few medical conditions, and medicines that can have contraindications against certain foodstuffs, but these are mostly obvious (don’t use peanut oil if you are nut allergic) or involve rarely used drugs (maoi inhibitors, seem to have many strange contradications, including Grapefruit).
While I haven’t tried trotters myself, I do know that a good cassoulet demands the use of cartilaginous parts like ears and tails. I can easily imagine that well cooked trotters will have an incredibly silky texture and lots of small, tender muscle structures to them. Could be good eats.
Vinegar and Baking Soda is in no ways dangerous, just very fizzy and unpleasent to taste. A similar mix of pure bicarbonate of soda (baking soda usually has some over stuff in it) with powdered citric acid, and sugar, is the basis for some sherbert and fizzy drink mixtures. The only dangers in otherwise correctly prepared foods are not to my knowledge from mixing two otherwise safe foods, but from concentrating the dangerous parts of foods which is otherwise safe in normal quantities. Huge amounts of Almonds, apple seed, Rhubardb and many other items will lead to possible poisoning.
I would be interested also in any site that can list such very rare cases where two food stuffs can react together dangerously. But as a risk factor in cooking such things are immensely less important that bacteriological effects such as undercooking or bad storage.
Well, I didn’t put any Soda Bicarb into the mix, and all in all, it tasted pretty good, but not the way my German Oma fixed it.
Also, like Zennie said, there are lots of bones and cartilaginous things in there. Could be why Oma encouraged us to suck out the marrow as well as eat the meat.
Y’all are gonna think I’m crazy as hell for saying this, but I miss those days. We were poor as church mice, but my German grandmother made damn sure we did not go to bed “hungry”. Or maybe it was just the stories she would tell us at bedtimes that made us forget that our bellies weren’t full.
I will be there in a while, Zennie, but you have awakened some memories that will need to be defined by looking at some pictures so that I may present those memories correctly. I may be linking y’all to some pictures of my Oma. Would that be all right?
