First, let me say that my love of food is second only to my love of ... well maybe it doesn’t come second to anything. I am a consummate, or just constantly consuming pantophagist. That is to say, there’s almost no food I could say I dislike. I was a post-war child, fairly poor, with struggling Hungarian parents who could do magical things with a bag of potatoes. My parents created wondrous, belly filling meals with homemade pasta (tészta), cabbage (káposzta), and pig’s trotters (kocsonya). My dad was the cook in the family, and he taught me that it was a mortal sin to waste any part of an animal, or vegetable.
Offal was a regular part of our diet. Ahhh ... the memories of sitting down to a spectacularly esculent bowl of steaming chicken giblet soup. You may not know that giblets are gizzards. Innards. Guts. How do you pronounce giblets? Who cares ... they don’t sound any more appetizing whether you say jibb-letz or gibb-letz. The truth is, they’re incredibly strange, chewy little morsels that defy a taste comparison.
Dad would use them to make stock for soup, then dump them into the soup, along with his to-die-for liver dumplings (májas gomboc). Yes, that’s two lots of offal in the one dish. Only a Hungarian could accomplish such culinary overkill. It may sound chuck-somely yucky you, but to me ... it’s a tasty bowl of my childhood.
But let me tell you about the kocsonya sertescsulok. To borrow a perfectly adequate exclamation from the younger generation ... OMG ... you haven’t lived till you’ve tried them! If you’re a complete food idiot, or don’t know Hungarian, don’t worry, I’ll explain. They’re actually jellied pigs’ feet.
Let me set the scene: Sunday morning. Kocsonya day. There would always be enough of this delicacy to feed the family on Sunday night, but the delight and anticipation was always in the preparation. Dad’s ever-willing seven-year-old assistant at his elbow, I’d await his military-style barked instructions to gather the ingredients.
Pig’s feet (or trotters as we referred to them), were cooked with onion, carrots, and garlic. And, as always, shovels full of paprika, salt, and whatever herbs and spices Dad would have in the garden at the time (we always grew our own veggies and much of our fruit).
It was incredibly important to twice boil the pigs’ feet. I do remember asking why ... but I soon learned that Dad’s razor sharp glare in response to such a ridiculous question wasn’t worth the answer. So we’d laboriously bring a vat full of pig’s feet to the boil, then discard the water, and wash the feet in cold water. Then we’d fill the vat again with water, re-add the religiously clean pigs feet along with the onions, carrots, garlic, paprika, salt, and mixed herbs and spices. I can still smell the bay leaves. Dad would slowly simmer this concoction for over three hours—skimming the water every now and then to keep the broth clear, and stabbing the pig’s feet occasionally and looking not into the pot, but skyward, as if asking for some kind of divine thumbs up.
Finally, at a time determined only by Dad, he would summon me to fetch individual serving bowls. He would put one or two trotters into each bowl (the adults got two), strain the broth, and pour it over the feet. He would drop in hard black peppercorns, sprinkle paprika over the top, and the delicacy would be laid to rest in the fridge until the broth formed a gorgeous wobbly jelly bed around the trotters. To this day, I can think of nothing more gastronomically gorgeous. Vinegar was passed around for those in the family who wanted to sprinkle it over to finish the dish. I can still remember the sound of my spoon separating the jelly from the trotter in the bowl: squooshinca. The heavenly taste of salty, peppery, spicy, melt-in-your-mouth pig’s feet, and the first gobbet of slippery jelly sliding down my throat.
