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Pepper Pot
A small knuckle of veal, 1 pound cocked tripe, 1 onion, 2 medium-sized potatoes, 1 bunch pot herbs, 1 cup Crisco, 3 quarts cold water. Wash veal and pot herbs and slice onion, put them with water, in soup kettle, on back of stove, where they will come gradually to boiling point. Allow to simmer 4 hours or more. Strain and set away to cool. This must be done day before it is wanted. When cold, skim off every particle of fat, add to it potatoes, cut in small cubes, tripe, cut in 1/2 inch squares, bay leaf, few sprigs parsley chopped fine, and meat cut from knuckle, rejecting every bit of fat and gristle. Put them on to boil just long enough before dinner to cook potatoes; when boiling season to taste with salt and red pepper. Thicken soup with one teaspoon each flour and cornstarch mixed smooth with little water. Mix Crisco with 1 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt and little pepper, and enough cold water to make dough stiff enough to roll out, cut in small squares and boil in soup 1/2 hour.
This is Philadelphia pepper pot, spread over two days: a veal broth made and chilled one day, finished with tripe, potatoes and dumplings the next. A few of the instructions are compressed or mistyped in the original.
- "Cocked tripe"A typesetting error for cooked tripe. Honeycomb tripe sold today is cleaned and bleached but usually raw, and needs 1½ to 3 hours of simmering on its own until it yields to a knife before it goes into the finished soup. The finishing time here -- long enough to cook the potatoes, plus the half hour the dumplings boil -- is nowhere near enough to tenderise raw tripe.
- Knuckle of vealA veal shank or hock, roughly 2 lb, bone in. The bone is the point: it supplies the gelatin that makes the chilled stock set. Ask a butcher, or substitute veal shank cut for osso buco.
- Pot herbsA bundle of soup greens rather than a specific plant: parsley stems, celery tops, a leek, a sprig of thyme, sometimes carrot. Tie them so they can be pulled out at straining.
- Back of the stoveOn a coal range this was the coolest zone. The recipe wants the pot brought up slowly and then held at a bare shiver for four hours. A rolling boil will cloud the broth, which matters here because nothing else clarifies it.
- The bay leafIt is called for in the method but omitted from the ingredient list. One leaf is right for three quarts; add it with the potatoes and tripe, not to the long-simmered stock.
- Red pepperCayenne. Season assertively but in stages, since the heat builds as the soup sits. Black pepper alone will not give the characteristic finish.
- The Crisco dumplingsOne cup of shortening to one cup of flour is a fat-heavy ratio by any standard, and reflects the fact that this book was published to promote Crisco. A quarter cup of shortening to a cup of flour makes a workable stiff dough; a full cup will not hold together for rolling.
- Dumpling timingSmall squares of a stiff flour dough need about 15 minutes in barely simmering broth, not half an hour. Keep the pot below a boil or they shed starch and thicken the soup past what the flour-and-cornstarch slurry intends.
- YieldThree quarts of stock reduced over four hours, plus meat, tripe, potatoes and dumplings, serves six to eight as a main course.
Pepper pot is Philadelphia's oldest claimed dish, and the story attached to it — that a Continental Army cook improvised it at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78 from tripe and scraps — is traditional rather than documented, and was already being repeated as fact by the nineteenth century. Often set against it is the Caribbean line: pepperpot is a West Indian stew, and the peppery, tripe-based soup sold from Philadelphia street stands through the 1800s, largely by Black women vendors whose cries were a fixture of the city's markets, is frequently placed in that tradition. By the time this book appeared the dish had been absorbed into standard American household cookery, which is why it turns up here in a Crisco-promotional calendar of dinners with the shortening worked into the dumpling dough. The oddity is its placement in the Eggs section, a reminder that promotional cookbooks of this kind were often assembled and sectioned with a loose hand.