Home › Meats › Tripe A La Lyonaise, with Tomatoes
Tripe A La Lyonaise, with Tomatoes
Take two pounds of dressed and boiled tripe; cut into strips about two inches long and put into a saucepan. Drain off the water in which the tripe has been parboiled; chop a small onion fine, and let all stew twentyfive minutes; add a little thickening, and then stir in half a can of good tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper. Very fine.
A short, loosely written note of the kind that assumes the cook already has a pot of tripe on the stove. The gaps are all in the liquid and the pre-cooking, so read those two points first.
- "Dressed and boiled" is most of the workTripe sold today is cleaned, and often bleached and scalded, but it is generally not cooked through. Expect roughly 1.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, in salted water with an onion and a bay leaf, before it is tender enough for this dish. The recipe's twenty-five minutes is a finishing stew, not the cooking.
- The liquid instruction is contradictoryYou are told to drain the parboiling water and then let everything stew for twenty-five minutes, with nothing added. In practice you want a few tablespoons of butter or fat to sweat the onion, then about half a cup of the tripe cooking liquor or light stock to stew in.
- "A little thickening"A flour-and-water slurry or a beurre manie of roughly a tablespoon of flour with the same of butter. Stir it in and let it cook two or three minutes before the tomatoes go in, or it will taste raw.
- Half a can of tomatoesCan sizes of the period were not standardised, so "half a can" is imprecise; tomato cans were commonly sold in 2 lb and 3 lb sizes. Judge by eye against two pounds of tripe rather than by a fixed weight, adding tomatoes until the stew is sauced but not swamped.
- OnionA Lyonnaise dish is defined by onion, and one small onion for two pounds of tripe is thin. A large onion, or two medium, sliced rather than chopped fine, is closer to what the name promises.
- Finish and seasoningSalt and pepper only, as written. Chopped parsley and a splash of wine vinegar at the end are traditional in Lyon and sharpen the tomato considerably.
- YieldTwo pounds of tripe serves four generously as a main course, with bread or boiled potatoes.
"A la Lyonnaise" in nineteenth-century cookery means, almost without exception, cooked with onions, a usage generally traced to Lyon's long association with onion growing and with onion-heavy bourgeois cooking. Lyon is also the great tripe city of France, home of tablier de sapeur and gras-double, and American cookbooks of the period borrowed the French tag freely to dignify offal that would otherwise be sold cheap. The tomatoes are the American addition and the reason for the qualifying phrase in the title: canned tomatoes were cheap and readily available, and well suited to lifting plain stewed meats. The whole entry, terse and ending in "Very fine," reads like a contributed recipe from a subscriber rather than a professional kitchen, which is typical of how these volumes were assembled.