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Tripe for Invalids
Take half a pound of fresh-dressed tripe. Wash it, cut it into squares, and remove almost all the fat. Cut up half a pound of lean beef in the same way, and put both into a stewpan with half a pint of cold water, half a spoonful of mustard, a small lump of sugar, and a little salt. Bring the liquor to the boil, skim carefully, then draw the saucepan to the side, and let its contents simmer gently for three hours. Mix a tea-spoonful of cornflour to a smooth paste with about a table-spoonful of cold water. Stir this into the sauce, and boil it gently for a few minutes. Put the meat on a hot dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve. Time to simmer the tripe, three hours. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for one person.
A plain sickroom stew, and one of the few Victorian invalid dishes that still eats well. The wording assumes a coal range and a butcher who sold tripe already cleaned and part-cooked.
- "Fresh-dressed tripe"Dressed tripe had already been scraped, cleaned and given a long preliminary boil by the tripe dresser before sale. Tripe sold today may be bleached honeycomb and may come raw or only blanched, so depending on what you buy the three hours here can be a realistic minimum rather than a generous one.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. It is a small amount of liquid for three hours of simmering — keep the lid on and top up with hot water if the pan threatens to go dry.
- "Half a spoonful of mustard"Genuinely ambiguous. Most likely dry English mustard powder rather than made mustard, and the spoon is probably a teaspoon, though the recipe names its teaspoons and tablespoons elsewhere and leaves this one bare; half a teaspoon of powder suits the quantity of meat and will read as savour rather than heat.
- A small lump of sugarA lump broken from Victorian loaf sugar was roughly teaspoon-sized, though lumps varied. Its job is to round the mustard and the mineral edge of the tripe, not to sweeten.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is US cornstarch, not cornmeal. A teaspoon slaked in a tablespoon of cold water will lightly bind 10 fl oz of liquor; boil it a minute or two to lose the raw starch taste.
- "Draw the saucepan to the side"Range language for moving the pot off the hot plate to the cooler edge. On a modern hob that is the lowest setting that keeps a bare tremble on the surface — a full boil will toughen the beef long before the tripe softens.
- SkimmingSkim thoroughly at the first boil, and it is worth skimming again once the pan has settled. Tripe throws a good deal of grey scum, and the simmering liquor is thin and pale until the cornflour goes in, so anything left in it shows.
- YieldThe book says sufficient for one, meaning one convalescent. A pound of meat between them makes a modest lunch for two people in ordinary health, with bread or plain boiled potatoes.
Invalid cookery had its own chapters in almost every late-Victorian household manual, and this recipe is no exception: the sickroom was a domestic responsibility, and beef tea, gruel, arrowroot and calf's-foot jelly were prescribed as much as any medicine. Tripe earned its place there because it was thought unusually easy of digestion — soft, bland, low in fat once trimmed, and long-cooked to nothing more demanding than a spoon could manage — while the half pound of lean beef simmered alongside it supplied the strengthening element the period valued above all. The mustard and the lump of sugar are there to make a dish for someone with no appetite taste of something. Tripe had another virtue: it was cheap offal from the working-class butcher, and dedicated tripe dressers in the northern manufacturing towns sold it ready-cleaned and part-boiled, which is why the recipe can begin so abruptly with washing and cutting.