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Irish Tripe
Procure the tripe quite fresh, cut it neatly into pieces two inches broad and four inches long, stew them for an hour in milk and water and a little salt; add onions, and boil them until tender. Put the tripe on a dish, thicken some of the sauce with flour and butter, and mix in a little mustard and the onions, which should be first drained and pressed through a sieve. Make the sauce hot, and serve it poured over the tripe. If liked, a little lemon-juice may be added. Time, an hour to stew tripe alone; about three-quarters of an hour with onions. Probable cost, 8d. per pound.
A straightforward braise of tripe and onions, thickened into a mustard sauce. The one thing the recipe assumes without saying is that the tripe arrives already part-cooked, which is where a modern cook is most likely to come unstuck.
- "Quite fresh" meant dressed tripe"Quite fresh" almost certainly assumes dressed tripe: Victorian tripe was generally bought from a tripe dresser who had already scalded, cleaned and boiled it, so an hour in milk and water was a finishing step rather than the whole job. Tripe sold today is usually bleached and blanched but not tender, and may need two to three hours of simmering before it stops being rubbery. Raw green tripe from a butcher needs longer still, plus thorough cleaning.
- Which tripeHoneycomb (the second stomach) has the best texture and is the easiest to find; blanket or plain tripe is thicker and takes longer. Cut it into the two-by-four-inch pieces given here after cooking if it shrinks unevenly.
- Milk and waterRoughly equal parts, enough to cover. Milk keeps tripe pale and softens its smell; it will catch on the base of the pan, so use a heavy pot and the barest simmer rather than a boil.
- The onionsTwo or three medium onions for a pound of tripe. Pressing them through a sieve was the period's way of making a smooth onion purée to enrich the sauce; a stick blender does the same in seconds. Drain them well first or the sauce will be thin.
- ThickeningFor about a pint of the cooking liquor, work 1 oz butter with 1 oz flour and whisk it in off the heat, then bring back to a simmer for a few minutes to cook out the flour. The recipe stirs the mustard in and then reheats the sauce; adding it afterwards, off the boil, will keep more of its bite.
- Mustard and lemonProbably English mustard, and a teaspoon is plenty against a mild base. The optional lemon juice goes in at the very end; added early to a milk-based sauce it can make it grainy.
- Cost and yieldEightpence a pound places tripe among the cheaper meats in this book's terms. Allow 6 to 8 oz per person, so a pound and a half serves three.
Tripe and onions in a floury white sauce was a staple of working households across the north of England, the Midlands and Ireland well into the twentieth century, sustained by a trade of specialist tripe dressers who sold the offal ready-boiled and ready to eat cold. This "Irish" version in Cassell's calls for a milk-and-water braise, a sieved onion pur tée thickening the sauce rather than sitting in it whole, and mustard sharpening the finish. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the later nineteenth century for a broad middle-class readership, routinely lists a probable cost per pound, and the eightpence quoted here places tripe firmly among the economical meats ecause the hhard cleaning work had been done by the tradesman, no great trouble to the cook.