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Beef Tripe, to Boil
Cut the tripe into small pieces and put into hot milk and water, equal parts, sufficient to cover it, and boil until tender, which will be in about two hours. Get ready some onion sauce, prepared as given below, and throw it over the tripe when dished. Peel some onions and let them remain a few minutes in salted water; then boil them till tender, changing the water when half done. If Spanish onions are used this will not be necessary. Drain them thoroughly, chop them, and add to them some sauce composed of two ounces of butter, three-quarters of a pint of milk, and a tea-spoonful of flour. Put the onions to the butter and boil for a minute before adding to the tripe. Cost, about 8d. per pound.
A plain Victorian tripe and onions: the tripe poached in milk and water, the onions boiled twice and folded into a thin white sauce. Two details need attention before you start — the state of the tripe you can buy, and the flour quantity in the sauce.
- Tripe is sold differently nowNearly all tripe at a butcher or supermarket today is already scalded, bleached and part-cooked, so the two hours here is far longer than it needs. Dressed honeycomb tripe is usually tender in 45 minutes to an hour and a half; test with a knife rather than watching the clock. Genuinely raw (green) tripe needs long scrubbing and several hours, and is rarely sold to domestic cooks.
- The milk-and-water bathEqual parts milk and water is not thrift but flavour and colour: the milk keeps the tripe pale and softens its smell. Keep it at a bare simmer, since milk at a rolling boil will catch on the pan bottom and scorch over that length of time.
- The flour is almost certainly wrongA teaspoonful of flour to three-quarters of a pint of milk will not thicken anything. The conventional white sauce of the period runs to roughly an ounce of flour to an ounce of butter per half-pint of milk; for this quantity work on about 1 oz (2 heaped tablespoons) of flour cooked in the 2 oz of butter. Treat the printed teaspoon as a misprint, or as an assumption that the chopped onions do the thickening.
- Imperial pintsThree-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, about 1¾ US cups. Two ounces of butter is half a stick.
- Why the onion water is changedBoiling ordinary strong onions, draining, and re-boiling in fresh water pulls out sulphurous harshness so the sauce stays sweet. Spanish onions, then as now, are mild enough to skip the step. Modern mild yellow or sweet onions behave much like Spanish.
- Drain the onions hardChopped boiled onions hold a surprising amount of water, which will thin the sauce to nothing. Press them in a sieve before they go into the butter, and give them the minute of boiling the recipe asks for to drive off the rest.
- SeasoningBeyond the salted water the onions soak in, no seasoning is specified for the finished dish; the book assumes it. It is bland without: white pepper and a grating of nutmeg in the sauce are traditional with tripe and onions.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity of tripe; this much sauce would suit something in the region of 1½ lb, enough for three or four. It is served hot, usually with boiled or mashed potatoes, and it sets when cold — reheat gently with a splash of milk.
- The cost line"About 8d. per pound" is a pre-decimal costing printed as a guide to household budgeting; the book does not say whether it refers to the tripe or to the finished dish. It is a period detail, not an instruction.
Tripe is the stomach lining of cattle, and boiling it with onions in milk is the standard British treatment, associated above all with Lancashire and the industrial North, where tripe dressers and dedicated tripe shops were a fixture of market towns into the twentieth century. Cassell's places it in the general run of cheap, nourishing meat cookery. The double-boiling of the onions and the milk bath both point to the same Victorian preoccupation ed, arguably edproducing something pale, mild and genteel from an ingredient the middle-class table is often said to have regarded with suspicion. Tripe's reputation in Britain fell away sharply after the Second World War, though the same dish survives in France as tripes in various regional forms and in Italy as trippa, usually with tomato rather than milk.