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To Prepare Tripe
Put the tripe in cold water after it has been wen cleaned, adding little salt; wash it well and change the salt water every day for several days; when the tripe gets to be very white, boil in a vessel of salt water. Drop the tripe in vinegar until wanted. Cut in any shape desired, and fry in batter.
When preferred, tripe is very nice cut in squares, dipped in beaten egg, and rolled in cracker crumbs and fried in hot fat.
This is a nineteenth-century method written for tripe that came home from the butcher raw and unbleached. Almost all tripe sold today has already been cleaned and scalded, which removes most of the reason for the multi-day soak.
- Start with what you can buySupermarket and butcher tripe is sold "dressed" or "bleached" — already scraped, scalded and pale. It needs a rinse and perhaps an hour in cold water, not days of daily changes. The long whitening soak in the original applies to green (unprocessed) tripe, which now turns up only at specialist or halal butchers.
- Keep the soak coldIf you do soak tripe over more than a few hours, do it in the refrigerator in a covered container, changing the salted water each day. The original gives no indication of where the tripe was held; a kitchen counter is not a substitute for raw offal kept for several days.
- "Boil in a vessel of salt water" means hoursThis is the step the text passes over fastest and the one that decides the dish. Honeycomb tripe needs roughly 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, until a knife goes through with no resistance. Undercooked tripe is rubbery and no amount of frying will fix it.
- Simmer, do not boil hardA rolling boil tightens the meat and clouds the pot. Hold it at a bare simmer and skim.
- The vinegar bath"Drop the tripe in vinegar until wanted" is a keeping method from before refrigeration — the acid held it for a day or two. Cover the cooked, cooled tripe with plain white vinegar in the fridge and use within two or three days; drain and pat very dry before it meets batter or fat, or nothing will stick.
- "Wen cleaned"A printer's error for "well cleaned." Original spelling and typography are preserved here as printed.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives none. Fry at 360–375°F, in batches, until the crust is deep gold — two to three minutes a side is enough, since the tripe is already fully cooked.
- YieldReckon 6 to 8 oz of raw tripe per person; it loses a good deal of bulk in the long simmer.
Tripe — the muscular stomach lining of cattle, most often the honeycomb second stomach — was cheap, filling, and until well into the twentieth century a fixture of butchers' counters in Britain and the United States alike. Recipes like this one survive from a period when the animal was used entire and the offal moved fast because it spoiled fast; the daily change of salt water and the holding bath of vinegar are both preservation habits from kitchens without mechanical cold. Two finishes are offered here, a batter and an egg-and-cracker-crumb coating, and cracker crumbs in particular reflect how commonly soda and water crackers stood in for breadcrumbs in nineteenth-century household cookery. The instruction to change the salt water daily for several days until the tripe gets to be very white points to tripe that arrives green rather than commercially dressed.