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Tripe, Boiled
Take two pounds of perfectly clean dressed tripe. If there be time, soak it in milk for some hours before boiling, and if it should happen that the milk turns sour, the acidity which the tripe will thus acquire will improve it rather than otherwise. If the tripe cannot be soaked, wash it in cold water, then cut it into pieces about three inches long and two broad. Put these into a saucepan, and cover with equal parts of cold milk and water. Let them boil, then add eight moderate-sized white onions, a table-spoonful of salt, and half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns. Cover the pan closely, and simmer the trip gently until tender. Lift out the onions, mince them finely, and press them through a coarse sieve. Mix with them as much melted butter made with milk instead of water as will make a thick sauce, and serve the tripe on a hot dish with the sauce poured over it, or, if preferred, the sauce may be served separately in a tureen. Some cooks flovour the sauce with mustard and a little vinegar. Time to boil, about two hours. Probable cost, tripe, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain Victorian supper dish that depends almost entirely on two things: the state of the tripe you start with, and understanding what "melted butter" meant in a nineteenth-century kitchen.
- "Dressed" tripeDressed tripe has already been cleaned, scalded and part-boiled by the butcher, sometimes for many hours. Almost all tripe sold today is dressed and bleached, so you are reheating and tenderising rather than cooking from raw. Honeycomb tripe is the usual choice for this treatment.
- The two hours is for Victorian tripeTripe was sold at very different stages of preparation then. Modern dressed tripe is usually tender in 45 minutes to an hour and a half of gentle simmering; test with a knife point rather than trusting the clock, and stop when it yields, since long over-boiling turns it slippery and characterless.
- Soaking in milkThe soak sweetens the tripe and softens any lingering offal smell. Do it in the refrigerator. The book's cheerful note that soured milk "will improve it rather than otherwise" reflects a kitchen with a cold larder and no refrigeration; deliberately letting milk sour on the counter for hours is not worth the risk with an already delicate ingredient.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterThis is the hinge of the recipe. In Victorian usage melted butter means a white sauce: roughly 1 oz butter cooked with 1 oz flour, then let down with about half a pint of liquid — here milk, and here enriched further with the sieved onion. Simply pouring warm butter over the tripe will not give the thick sauce described.
- The onionsEight moderate white onions is a lot of onion for two pounds of tripe, and that is the point: they cook down in the milk and become the body of the sauce. Sieving is what makes it smooth; a food mill or a short blitz with a stick blender does the same job in a fraction of the time.
- Milk and waterThe recipe gives no reason for the equal parts, though diluting the milk does make the liquid less prone to catching and scorching over a long simmer. Keep the heat very low — milk at a rolling boil will scum and stick. Reserve some of the cooking liquid to thin the sauce if it goes past thick into stiff.
- SeasoningA tablespoon of salt is aimed at two pounds of tripe plus the liquid, most of which is discarded; taste the finished sauce before adding more. The mustard and vinegar variation at the end is worth taking — tripe in milk badly wants some acid and sharpness.
- Yield and costFive or six portions, as stated. The 8d. per pound is a period price and tells you this was cheap food; tripe is now a specialist purchase and priced accordingly.
Tripe — the stomach lining of cattle — was for centuries one of the cheapest forms of meat protein in Britain, and boiling it with milk and onions is the classic northern English treatment, associated above all with Lancashire and the industrial towns where tripe dressers and tripe shops were a fixture into the twentieth century. The dish's economics are visible in the entry itself: eightpence a pound, enough for six people, and a sauce built from onions rather than cream or stock. Cassell's presents it as a matter of course, and the long labour of cleaning and scalding the stomach had already been done by the butcher who sold it "dressed." The pairing with onions is old and near-universal in English cookery writing; the optional mustard and vinegar point toward the same instinct that produces tripe served cold with vinegar in the north, cutting a mild, gelatinous meat with something sharp.