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ROLLA CHEESE (a breakfast or supper dish)
Divide about two pounds of prepared tripe into pieces three inches square, the rough side inwards. Lay on each one of these a narrow strip of the skirt of beef; cut fat and lean together, and do not entirely cover the tripe with the beef. Season with pepper and salt, and roll the tripe up with the meat in it. Tie the rolls with twine, and sew the edges together. When the rolls are all made, drop them into a sauce-pan of boiling water, and let them boil softly until a straw will easily penetrate them. Take them up, drain them, lay them side by side in a dish, put a board with a weight upon them to press them, and let them remain until cold. Keep them in a pickle of vinegar and water, and before serving cut them into thin slices.
A pressed cold meat in the brawn family, built from tripe wrapped around beef and kept in vinegar. Two things decide the outcome: how far the tripe is cooked before you slice it, and how you store it once pressed.
- "Prepared tripe" is not what you buy nowA Victorian tripe dresser sold tripe already cleaned, scalded and largely boiled, so it needed comparatively little further cooking. Tripe sold today ranges from raw to lightly par-cooked; expect 1½ to 3 hours of gentle simmering before a straw or skewer slides in without resistance. Underdone tripe slices into rubber.
- Skirt of beefIn British butchery the name covers several thin, coarse-grained cuts from the diaphragm and flank. Modern skirt steak or flank steak both work; the recipe deliberately wants fat and lean together, so do not trim it lean.
- Rough side inwardsThe honeycomb or shaggy face goes in against the beef. It grips the filling and holds seasoning, while the smooth side gives you a clean outer surface for slicing.
- Tying and sewingUse undyed cotton butcher's twine, and sew the open edges with a trussing needle and the same twine so the beef cannot escape into the water. Roll tightly — slack rolls press into slices that fall apart.
- Boil softlyA bare simmer, around 185–195F, with the pan barely trembling. A hard boil bursts the seams and toughens both the tripe and the skirt.
- The pressPack the drained rolls snugly side by side so there is nowhere for them to spread, then weight them with a board and 4–5 lb — a couple of large tins on a plate does it. They must cool completely under weight, ideally overnight, or they will not slice thin.
- Storage, and the limits of the pickleThe strength of the "pickle of vinegar and water" is not given, so it cannot be relied on to preserve anything. Treat this as a cooked meat kept in a refrigerated acidulated brine: use a jar, cover the rolls completely, keep them at 40F or below, and eat within three or four days. Do not keep it in a cool cupboard as the original assumes.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of tripe plus the beef gives six to eight servings as a cold breakfast or supper dish. Slice very thin across the roll so each round shows the spiral, and serve with mustard, more vinegar, or brown bread and butter.
This belongs to the large Victorian family of pressed cold meats — brawn, collared beef, head cheese — where "cheese" means nothing dairy at all but simply a solid mass shaped under weight, as cheese is. The dish depends on a trade that has largely vanished: the tripe dresser, who cleaned, scalded and boiled offal for sale ready to cook, a fixture of northern English towns and especially of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where tripe shops survived into living memory. It belongs among the cheap breakfast and supper dishes because it does exactly what such a household wanted: it turns two of the least expensive things at the butcher's, tripe and skirt, into something that slices neatly, travels to the table cold, and can be cut for several days running. The name Rolla is not documented in the standard cookery references. One suggestion is that it is a fanciful dressing-up of "rolled", of a piece with the Victorian habit of giving humble offal dishes a grander-sounding title, but it is only one guess among others.