Home › The Principles of Cookery › Tripe and Eggs, Fricasseed
Tripe and Eggs, Fricasseed
Take three-quarters of a pound of cold boiled tripe, put it in a saucepan with just enough milk to cover it, a bay-leaf, and a slice or two of onion, celery, and carrot. When it boils, put the tripe on a dish, cover, and keep it warm over boiling water. Now strain the milk, and add flour, butter, and seasoning to make it a plain white sauce. Boil four eggs hard, quarter them lengthwise, dish them up with the tripe, and pour the sauce over. Cost, about 1s. 6d.
A frugal supper dish built on tripe that has already been cooked. The whole thing hinges on that word "boiled" in the first line — what British shops sold as dressed tripe in the 1890s was already tender, and what most butchers sell today is not.
- Start with tripe that is actually cookedBritish "dressed" tripe was cleaned, scalded and boiled by the tripe dresser before sale, so the recipe assumes a ready-to-eat product. Tripe bought raw or merely bleached needs two to three hours of gentle simmering with aromatics before it reaches the state this recipe begins at; it will stay rubbery otherwise.
- Which tripeHoneycomb (the second stomach) holds sauce best and is the usual choice; blanket or plain tripe from the first stomach is flatter and blander. Either works, cut into strips or squares roughly two inches across.
- "Just enough milk to cover"For 12 oz of tripe in a small saucepan that is around 300–400 ml. Whole milk is right — the sauce depends on it for body and there is no stock in the dish.
- The infusion is briefBringing the milk to a boil with the bay, onion, celery and carrot is really a brief infusion, not further cooking of the tripe; the recipe lifts the tripe out as soon as the milk boils. Longer will not improve anything and the tripe is only being warmed through.
- Proportions for the sauceThe recipe gives none. For 400 ml of the strained milk use 25 g butter and 25 g flour, cooked together for a minute before the milk goes in. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, which was common in milk sauces of the period.
- Hard-boiled eggsNine to ten minutes from simmering, then straight into cold water, gives set yolks without the grey-green ring. Quartering lengthwise, as directed, gives sixteen wedges to arrange around the tripe.
- "Fricasseed"In Victorian usage this means cooked and served in a white sauce, not fried. No browning is wanted at any stage — the dish should stay pale.
- Yield and costServes two generously or three as part of a larger meal. Tripe was among the cheapest animal foods available; the 1s. 6d. is a period marker, not a guide.
Tripe belonged to the industrial north and midlands of England more than to genteel tables, and it reached the cook already prepared: tripe dressers were a distinct trade, cleaning and boiling the stomach lining for hours before selling it by the pound, often alongside cow heel. That is why a recipe can open with "cold boiled tripe" and spend no words on the days of soaking, scraping and simmering behind it. Dressing tripe in a white sauce with hard-boiled eggs pulls a working-class ingredient toward the vocabulary of the middle-class dinner table — the same treatment given to cod, chicken or rabbit in a hundred other Victorian fricassees. The costing in shillings and pence, printed for most entries in the book, was aimed squarely at the household manager reckoning what a meat supper for the family need cost.