Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › How to Cut and Cure Meats › TO CLEAN BEEF TRIPE
TO CLEAN BEEF TRIPE
Empty the paunch, rinse it thoroughly in cold water, being careful not to let any of the contents get on the outside. Make strong cleansed water or white lye, let it heat a little, too warm to hold the hands in, pour it over the tripe in a tub, let it stand two or three hours, then tack it up against a board, and with a knife scrape downwards, taking off the inner skin, or rinse it clean in cold water; sprinkle lime over, put in a tub, cover with warm water, and let it stand two or three hours, then scrape it with a knife; if the dark does not all come off easily, sprinkle more lime on, and let it lie for an hour longer, then scrape again, and rinse in cold water until clean. Place it in water enough to cover with a large handful of salt, let it remain in the salt water three days and nights, changing it each day, then take it out, cut in pieces about six inches wide and twelve long, lay in buttermilk for a few hours to whiten; then rinse it clean in cold water, and boil until tender; it will take from four to ten hours, as it should be done so that it can be mashed with the fingers. After thus prepared it can be cooked as preferred.
This is a butchering-floor procedure rather than a kitchen one, and it belongs to a household that killed its own beef. It cannot be followed today as written; the notes below explain the terms and where the process fails.
- Caustics with no measured strength"Cleansed water or white lye" is almost certainly the liquor drained from wood ashes, whose alkalinity varies from one batch of ashes to the next. The recipe fixes no concentration, offers no guide beyond "too warm to hold the hands in" and "two or three hours," and gives no neutralising or test step, so there is no way to know whether the finished tripe still carries caustic residue.
- The lime is not baking limeThe "lime" here is quicklime or slaked lime, used to loosen the dark inner membrane. The recipe does not specify which, and neither agricultural nor building lime is food grade; quicklime in particular reacts violently with water and burns skin, eyes and mucous membrane on contact.
- Rumen contentsThe paunch is the rumen, the first stomach, and its contents can carry E. coli, including O157:H7, and other enteric organisms. The whole first paragraph is an exercise in handling that material in a domestic tub, and the warning about not letting the contents touch the outside is the only control offered.
- Three days in salt water at room temperatureThree days in salt water -- A three-day soak in a hand-thrown "large handful of salt" is not a cure. The brine strength is unknown and probably far below what would inhibit spoilage organisms, the recipe names no holding temperature, and the daily change simply restarts the clock.
- Buy it dressed insteadTripe sold for food today is generally already scalded and cleaned at the abattoir under inspection, and often bleached. Begin from dressed honeycomb or blanket tripe and follow a current recipe for cooking it.
- What the long boil tells youThe four to ten hours until it "can be mashed with the fingers" is the one piece of information still worth having: tripe is muscle with a very high collagen content and needs hours of slow cooking, not minutes, whatever the recipe that follows.
Buckeye Cookery descends from an Ohio community cookbook of the mid-1870s, though the widely circulated editions under that title were issued from Minneapolis; its meat chapter assumes a household that slaughtered a beef itself and was obliged to find a use for every part of it. Tripe was thrift food in exactly that sense: cheap, laborious, and worth the labour only because the alternative was waste. The lye-and-lime method described here mirrored what commercial tripe dressers did on a larger scale, and the materials were simply what was to hand on a farm, where ash lye served for soap, scouring and hominy and slaked lime for whitewash and mortar. The buttermilk soak "to whiten" is the same cosmetic step that the trade later accomplished with bleaching agents, and it points to a market that judged tripe first by its colour. Directions this long and this technical are generally said to fade from American cookbooks as butchering moved off the farm and into the packing houses.