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Fricasseed Tripe
Cut 2 pounds of tripe into narrow strips, add 1/2 cup of water, 2 cups milk, season with salt and pepper, add 1/4 cup Crisco mixed with 2 tablespoons flour; simmer for 30 minutes and serve hot. A little chopped parsley is an improvement.
A plain white fricassee of the sort that once counted as an everyday supper dish. The recipe assumes something a modern cook cannot assume: that the tripe reaching the kitchen is already tender.
- Start with the tripe, not the sauceThirty minutes is nowhere near enough for raw or merely scalded tripe, which needs roughly one and a half to three hours of gentle simmering in water before it is tender enough to eat. Tripe was commonly sold already dressed and partly boiled by butchers when this book was written, whereas much supermarket honeycomb tripe today is cleaned and blanched only. Simmer it until a knife slips through easily, then cut it into strips and give it the 30 minutes in milk as written.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. A quarter cup is 4 tablespoons; use butter for a better sauce, or any neutral solid fat if you want the original texture.
- Mixing fat and flour"1/4 cup Crisco mixed with 2 tablespoons flour" means a beurre manié-type paste stirred into the liquid, not a cooked roux. It works, but the sauce tastes floury unless it holds a low simmer for the full half hour. Cooking the fat and flour together for two minutes first, then whisking in the milk, gives a cleaner result.
- Milk that will not scorchTwo cups of milk with only a half cup of water thickens as it reduces and catches easily on a thin pan. Keep it at a bare tremble, use a heavy pan, and stir the bottom every few minutes.
- Choice of tripeHoneycomb tripe (the second stomach) is the standard and cuts into neat strips. Blanket or plain tripe is tougher and takes longer. Either wants a rinse and a look-over before cooking.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper and parsley are all the original allows, and the dish is bland without more. A slice of onion or a bay leaf in the simmering milk, a scrape of nutmeg, and a squeeze of lemon at the end are all in keeping with the period style.
- YieldTwo pounds of tripe with sauce serves four as a main course, six if it goes over toast, a common way of serving creamed dishes of this kind.
A fricassee, in the vocabulary of American cookbooks of this period, means meat cut small and finished in a pale sauce rather than browned — the opposite of a saute or a stew with gravy. Tripe was cheap offal, sold ready-boiled by butchers, and appears steadily in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books, most often broiled, fried in crumbs, or served exactly like this in milk. Its presence in a Crisco-published calendar of dinners is a marketing decision as much as a culinary one: the company's cookbooks worked through the whole ordinary repertoire, from cake to offal, to show that one tin of shortening could replace butter, lard and drippings on every page. Tripe's near-disappearance from American home cooking came later, and is often attributed to the decline of the whole-animal butcher shop and the loss of the pre-boiled tripe that made a thirty-minute recipe like this one plausible.