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Beef Tripe, to Roast
Boil two pounds of tripe for an hour or more, and then cut into convenient-sized pieces. Spread them out, and lay over each a rich veal stuffing. Skewer and tie securely into rolls. Baste continually with butter, and dredge flour over them. They may either be spitted or baked in an oven. Serve with sliced lemon and unmelted butter. Probable cost, 8d. per pound for the best tripe. Time to roast, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian way of making a plain boiled ingredient into a joint: tripe is pre-cooked, stuffed, rolled and roasted. Everything depends on the tripe being genuinely tender before it is rolled.
- Boil it properly firstAn hour is optimistic for most tripe sold today. Honeycomb tripe from a butcher usually needs 1.5 to 3 hours of gentle simmering, often in milk and water with an onion, until a knife slides through with no resistance. Roasting will not soften it further, so test before you cut and roll.
- What "veal stuffing" meantNot stuffing made of veal, but the forcemeat traditionally served with veal: breadcrumbs, shredded suet or butter, chopped parsley, grated lemon peel, a little mace or nutmeg, salt and pepper, bound with egg. A herbed sausagemeat stuffing works if you want something richer.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. If baking rather than spitting, a fairly hot oven, around 400-425F (200-220C), will brown the flour dredge; the tripe is already cooked, so the aim is colour and crust rather than heat penetration.
- Skewer and tieCut the boiled tripe into rectangles roughly 4 by 6 inches, spread the forcemeat thinly, roll up and tie with butcher's twine at two or three points. Cocktail sticks work in place of small skewers. Loose rolls will unwind and spill the stuffing.
- Basting and dredgingThe alternating butter-and-flour treatment builds a thin crisp coat, a common Victorian finish for spit-roasted meat. Baste and dredge two or three times over the 45 minutes; if the flour looks pasty rather than golden, the oven is too cool.
- "Unmelted butter"Butter served plain and firm at the table, in a pat or curls, to be taken with the hot rolls, as opposed to the period's flour-thickened 'melted butter' sauce. The lemon slices are served alongside; squeezing them over is the obvious use, though the recipe does not say so.
- Cost and yield8d. per pound is the price given for the best tripe; how cheap that was against butcher's meat is not something the recipe establishes. Two pounds of tripe plus stuffing serves four or five as the original claims, though modern appetites will read it as four.
Tripe -- the stomach lining of cattle, most often the honeycomb second stomach -- was one of the staple cheap proteins of nineteenth-century industrial Britain, sold ready-boiled from dedicated tripe shops in Lancashire and Yorkshire and eaten cold with vinegar or stewed with onions. Cassell's, aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, includes several tripe entries, and this one is an exercise in dressing offal upward: by stuffing it with veal forcemeat, spitting it, basting it with butter and serving it with lemon, the cook borrows the whole apparatus of a roast joint for an ingredient that cost pennies a pound. The instruction that it "may either be spitted or baked in an oven" reflects a period in which the closed range was increasingly displacing the open hearth in domestic kitchens, and cookbooks had to speak to both.