Soused Tripe
After preparing it according to directions in "How to cut and cure meats," place in a stone jar in layers, seasoning every layer with pepper and salt, and pour over boiling vinegar, in which, if desired, a few whole cloves, a sprinkle of mace, and a stick of cinnamon have been boiled; or cover with the jelly or liquor in which the tripe was boiled. When wanted for table, take out of jar, scrape off the liquid, and either broil, fricassee, fry in butter, or fry plain. -Mrs. Eliza T. Carson, Mt. Pleasant Farm.
A farm method for holding boiled tripe in a crock, written for a household that killed its own beef and had a cool cellar. The preserving step is the part that does not survive scrutiny; the finishing methods are ordinary enough.
- Why the cautionThe tripe is packed into an open stone jar and held at cellar temperature with no measured acid, no measured salt and no seal. Boiling vinegar poured over layers of meat cools quickly and is diluted by the meat's own juices, so the finished brine may not reach the pH that inhibits bacterial growth. Follow a current tested pickling or refrigeration procedure instead.
- The jelly variant is worseThe alternative — covering the tripe with the unacidified jelly or liquor it was boiled in — is a low-acid, low-oxygen meat pack held without refrigeration. That is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, and the broiling or frying at serving time cannot be relied on to make such a pack safe.
- "Souse"To souse is to steep in vinegar or brine. In nineteenth-century American kitchens souse commonly meant pig's head, feet and ears set in their own vinegared jelly; the same treatment is applied to tripe here.
- The missing first stepThe recipe leans on the book's "How to cut and cure meats" chapter for the preliminary cleaning and cooking. Nothing in the text above cleans or cooks the tripe — it assumes that work is already done.
- Tripe todaySupermarket and butcher tripe is sold scalded and bleached, sometimes partly cooked, so it bears little resemblance to the green tripe straight from a farm slaughter that Mrs. Carson had in front of her.
- Stone jarA glazed stoneware crock kept in a cellar. It was a standard vessel for anything held in brine or vinegar, and it was not airtight.
- Mace and cinnamonMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed — warmer and lighter than the nut itself. With whole cloves and a cinnamon stick it makes a common pickling spice mixture of the period, boiled in the vinegar rather than added to the jar.
- The finishing methodsBroiling, frying in butter or making a fricassee were all ways of turning a cold preserved slab back into a hot dish. Tripe that has been long boiled needs only browning at that stage; it will not tenderise further.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in 1877, compiled from contributions by named women — here Mrs. Eliza T. Carson of Mt. Pleasant Farm — and it is a book about using the whole animal. Tripe, the first three stomachs of a ruminant, was cheap where beef was killed on the place and worthless if it spoiled, so it went into the souse crock alongside pigs' feet and headcheese. Souse itself is old: the word is generally traced to a Germanic root for pickling brine, and English cookery had been steeping meats in spiced vinegar for centuries before it crossed to American farm kitchens. What the entry really records is a storage strategy rather than a dish — meat kept in the crock, with the cook deciding at each meal whether the day's portion would be broiled, fried or fricasseed.