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Tripe, Curried
Mince finely three or four large onions, put them in a stewpan with two ounces of butter, and fry them until they are tender. Rub them through a sieve, and mix smoothly with the pulp a table-spoonful of ground rice and a table-spoonful of curry-paste. Add gradually a pint of stock, and stir the sauce over the fire until it boils. Take two pounds of tripe already boiled till tender; put it into the sauce with a little more stock, let it boil gently for an hour, and remove the scum carefully as it rises. Serve on a hot dish, and send rice boiled as for curry to table with it. Time to simmer the tripe, one hour. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward Victorian curry that depends entirely on the tripe being properly cooked before it ever meets the sauce. Everything else is a thickened onion gravy.
- Start with tripe that is already tenderThe recipe assumes tripe "already boiled till tender" — the hinge of the dish. Tripe sold today is usually dressed but only part-cooked, and will generally need a couple of hours of gentle simmering in water or stock, until a knife goes through with no resistance, before the hour in the sauce. Tripe put in underdone will still be rubbery after the hour, because the hour here is a finishing time, not a cooking time.
- Sieving the onionsRubbing fried onion through a sieve produces a smooth pulp; a blender or stick blender does the same in seconds. Fry the onions slowly in the butter until genuinely soft and pale gold, not browned, or the purée turns bitter.
- Ground riceRice ground to a coarse flour: the same product long sold for rice puddings, and a fine rice flour will serve. One tablespoon in a pint of stock gives a light, slightly grainy sauce rather than a flour-thickened one; cornflour would give a glossier, more slippery result.
- Curry pasteVictorian curry pastes were generally commercial products, and mild by current standards. A tablespoon of a modern paste — particularly a Thai or a hot Madras type — may overwhelm the pint of stock. Use a mild curry paste, taste after the sauce boils, and add more if it is thin-flavoured.
- MeasuresA pint here is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz or about 570 ml. Two ounces of butter is about 55 g.
- The scumTripe throws off a greyish foam and fat as it simmers. Skimming it is not fussiness — left in, it makes the sauce cloudy and greasy.
- SaltNo salt is specified, on the assumption of a well-made household stock. Season at the end, once the sauce has reduced over the hour, rather than at the start.
- Yield and servingFive or six as written, with plain boiled long-grain rice. The "probable cost, 8d. per pound" is a period price note of the kind the book supplies as a matter of course, and suggests an inexpensive dish.
Tripe and curry powder meet here for the same reason they meet in a good deal of nineteenth-century British cooking: both were cheap, and curry was often said to be a useful treatment for meat that needed help. Tripe — the stomach lining of cattle — was a staple of industrial northern England and of London's poorer tables, sold ready-dressed and boiled by specialist tripe dressers, which is why the recipe can begin with it already tender. Curry paste and powder had by this period become ordinary grocery items rather than exotica, manufactured commercially in Britain and used, as here, as a single flavouring spoonful rather than a built spice mixture. Cassell's, aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, prints the price per pound as a matter of course.