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Tripe, Baked
Take a pound of fresh dressed white tripe. Wash it in cold water, and cut into neat squares. Slice half a dozen onions, and fry them lightly in butter. Put them into an earthen baking-dish which has a closely-fitting lid, lay the tripe upon them, and sprinkle over it a large table-spoonful of flour and a little pepper and salt. Cover the whole with milk, put on the lid, and bake the tripe in a moderate oven. When done enough skim the fat from the top, and serve the tripe on a hot dish. Some cooks substitute cider for the milk, and also put a table-spoonful of Indian chutney with the meat before baking it. Time to bake, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, tripe, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A plain Victorian supper dish that depends entirely on the state of the tripe you start with. Everything else is onions, flour and milk.
- "Fresh dressed white tripe"Dressed tripe was sold already cleaned, scalded and part-boiled by the tripe dresser, so ninety minutes in the oven was enough to finish it. Tripe sold today varies: bleached honeycomb tripe from a supermarket is usually cleaned but raw, and needs two to three hours of gentle simmering in water before it is tender enough for this dish. Tripe from a Northern English tripe shop or an Italian butcher is often sold pre-cooked and can go straight in.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. The dish should barely bubble under the lid; a hard boil will split the milk.
- The earthen baking-dishAny lidded casserole or Dutch oven of about two quarts. The tight lid matters more than the material, since the milk is the only liquid and there is no basting.
- Half a dozen onions to a pound of tripeThat is not a misprint. Tripe is bland and the onions are the flavour of the dish; frying them lightly in butter first, without colouring them much, is what keeps the sauce sweet rather than raw-tasting.
- The flourSprinkled dry over the tripe, it thickens the milk into a thin sauce as the dish bakes. Whisk it into a little of the cold milk first if you would rather not risk lumps.
- Cider instead of milkThe two are alternatives, not a combination -- acid cider and milk together will curdle. Use a dry English-style cider, not a sweet one.
- Indian chutneyA bottled sweet, spiced chutney of the kind Victorian grocers sold, mango being the commonest. One tablespoon in a dish this size reads as a background sweetness rather than as curry.
- SkimmingThe butter from the onions and the fat rendered from the tripe will pool on the surface. Skimming is not optional here; unskimmed, the sauce tastes greasy.
- YieldTwo to three as written, as a main course with bread or boiled potatoes.
Tripe -- the stomach lining of cattle -- was one of the cheapest meats in nineteenth-century Britain, and at eightpence a pound it sat below prime beef, though close to the cheaper butcher's cuts. The trade had its own specialists: tripe dressers scraped, scalded and boiled the offal before it reached the customer, which is why so many Victorian recipes begin, as this one does, with meat that is already half cooked and simply need finishing. Tripe and onions in milk is the standard treatment across the North of England and in Lancashire in particular, usually stewed on the hob; baking it in a covered earthen dish is the same dish moved into the oven, where it could sit unattended. Cassell's habit of quoting a probable cost and the number it will feed reflects the book's audience of households running to a budget, and the alternative version with cider and chutney shows how quickly Anglo-Indian store-cupboard flavours had spread into ordinary English cooking.