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Baked Tripe
Cut tripe into good-sized pieces and spread over them the following stuffing: Mix together 4 tablespoons crumbs, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 teaspoons salt, dust powdered mace, 1 tablespoon chopped cooked ham, 1 chopped onion, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, dust paprika, and 1 well beaten egg. Roll them up and fasten with wooden toothpicks. Dredge with flour and spread on each 1 tablespoon Crisco. Bake in hot oven 30 minutes, basting frequently with melted Crisco and hot water. Garnish with lemon slices and pass melted butter.
A Crisco-era treatment of a cheap cut, written when tripe came home from the butcher already boiled. Modern tripe does not, and that single difference decides whether the dish works.
- Pre-cook the tripe firstSupermarket honeycomb tripe is cleaned and bleached but raw and rubbery. Simmer it in salted water until a knife goes through easily — typically 1½ to 2½ hours — then cool and pat dry before stuffing. Thirty minutes in the oven will not tenderize it; the original assumed tripe sold ready-boiled.
- Hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-450°F. At that heat the flour dredge browns and the outside crisps within the half hour given.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, hence Crisco in three places. Any solid shortening works, and butter or lard gives more flavor; the 3 tablespoons in the stuffing are there to keep the crumb mixture from drying out.
- CrumbsProbably dry, fine breadcrumbs rather than the coarse fresh kind, though the recipe does not say. Four tablespoons is a small amount of stuffing — on the order of enough for a pound of tripe cut into four or five pieces.
- Mace and paprika"Dust" means a pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed and is generally the milder, more floral of the two; ground nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly.
- BastingMelted fat plus hot water spat into a very hot pan makes a mess. Brush with fat alone and add a few tablespoons of water to the bottom of the dish instead, topping it up so it never dries out entirely.
- ToothpicksSoak wooden picks in water first, or use butcher's twine, which will not scorch at this temperature. Count them going in and remove them before serving.
- Yield and servingOne pound of tripe with this stuffing serves two to three. The lemon and melted butter are not decoration — the acid is what makes rich, gelatinous tripe palatable, so serve the lemon in generous wedges.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble published after introducing Crisco in 1911, written by Marion Harris Neil, and the recipes name the shortening throughout; the books were promotional literature as much as cookery. Tripe — the stomach lining of a cow, usually the honeycomb second stomach — belonged to the same thrift economy the book was pitching to, cheap, filling, and in need of the flavoring that stuffing, ham, and onion provide. Baked and rolled tripe of this kind appears in British and American cookery through the nineteenth century, and tripe was commonly sold already dressed and boiled by the tripe dresser, which may explain why so many old recipes give an oven time that looks impossibly short today.