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Tripe and Onions
Have ready two pounds of boiled tripe, with enough of the liquor in which it was boiled to cover it. Bring it to the boil, add a pound or more of onions in quarters, and cook till they are tender. If very large, parboil the onions separately. Add towards the end of the cooking about half a pint of milk mixed with one and a half ounces of flour. Boil up, cook for ten minutes longer, season to taste, and serve on a hot dish. The tripe should be cut up into convenient pieces for serving, and the onions and gravy should be poured over it. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A plain white stew that depends entirely on the state of the tripe you start with. Cassell's assumes you bought it already boiled from a tripe dresser, which is no longer how tripe reaches a kitchen.
- "Boiled tripe" is the hingeTripe sold today is usually bleached and only part-cooked, not the fully tender tripe a Victorian tripe dresser sold ready to eat. It needs simmering in salted water or milk until a knife goes through with no resistance — commonly 1½ to 3 hours depending on the cut — before this recipe begins. Starting from raw and following the timings here gives you rubber.
- Which tripeHoneycomb (second stomach) is the usual choice and holds sauce best; blanket or plain tripe is thicker and takes longer. Rinse well and trim any dark or fatty edges before the first boil.
- The cooking liquorThe liquid the tripe was boiled in carries most of the flavour, so keep it rather than fresh water. If it tastes flat or strongly of offal, replace half with milk — tripe is often cooked in milk, as the recipe itself goes on to do.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups). One and a half ounces of flour is roughly 5 tablespoons.
- Thickening without lumpsWhisk the flour into the cold milk to a smooth slurry before it goes near the pan, then pour it in while stirring. The ten minutes of further cooking is not padding: it is what cooks the raw starch out of the flour.
- OnionsA pound of onions to two pounds of tripe is a generous proportion. The recipe directs that very large onions be parboiled separately before joining the tripe; smaller ones go in as quarters with no pre-cooking.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" here means salt and white pepper, and the dish is much improved by a scrape of nutmeg or a blade of mace in the liquor. Bay and a little vinegar or lemon at the end also help cut the richness.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of tripe serves four generously as a main course. Mashed or boiled potatoes are the standard accompaniment; the cost note of 1s 6d marks it as a cheap dish for a whole family.
Tripe — the stomach lining of cattle — was one of the great cheap urban meats of nineteenth-century Britain, and tripe and onions in a milk-thickened sauce is the dish most associated with it, particularly in Lancashire and the industrial North. Its place in a book like Cassell's reflects the trade behind it: tripe was bought from a specialist tripe dresser who had already scoured, bleached and boiled it, so the household cook's job was only to finish it with onions and sauce. That is why the recipe opens with two pounds of tripe already boiled and offers no cleaning instructions at all. The stated cost of 1s 6d for a dish feeding a family is the point of the entry; when offal fell out of British favour in the later twentieth century, dishes like this went with it, though tripe remains everyday food in Mexican, Italian, Chinese and West African cooking.