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Tripe, Fricasseed
Take about two pounds of fresh tripe as sold by the vendors; cut it into pieces three inches long and two broad, wash these in cold water, and dry them in a cloth. Put them into a stewpan, cover with equal parts of milk and water, add two onions and a bunch of parsley, and simmer gently for an hour. Rub an ounce of butter smoothly with a little flour, moisten with a quarter of a pint of cream, and stir it into the sauce. Add the thin rind of half a lemon, a little pepper and salt, and the eighth part of a nutmeg, grated; then simmer for another hour. Put the tripe into a hot dish, take the sauce from the fire, stir a lump of fresh butter into it until this is dissolved, and pour it over the meat. In stewing the tripe be careful that it does not burn to the bottom of the pan. A dish of boiled rice is a suitable accompaniment to tripe prepared in this way. Time to stew, two hours. Probable cost, tripe, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A white stew of the old school: the tripe gives up nothing to the sauce, so all the flavour has to come from the aromatics and the final butter. Two things decide whether it works — the state of the tripe you start with, and keeping the milk from catching.
- "Tripe as sold by the vendors"Victorian tripe dressers sold it already scalded, cleaned and boiled for hours, so two hours of simmering was a finishing step, not the cooking. Most tripe today is sold bleached and partly cleaned but still essentially raw; unless the packet says cooked or dressed, it will need several hours of prior simmering in water before it is tender enough for this recipe.
- Scorching is the hingeMilk and cream on a long slow simmer will catch and taint the whole dish, which is why the recipe breaks off to warn about it. Use a heavy-based pan, keep the heat at a bare shiver, and stir up from the bottom every ten minutes or so.
- A quarter of a pint of creamAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. Single cream or half-and-half is closer to the original than heavy cream, which will thicken the sauce past the point intended.
- Butter and flourAn ounce is 2 tablespoons; the recipe says only 'a little flour', so judge it by feel (roughly equal volume gives a workable paste). This is a beurre manié, not a cooked roux, so it needs the second hour of simmering to lose its raw taste.
- Lemon rind and nutmegTake the rind in wide strips with a peeler, no white pith, and lift them out before serving. An eighth of a whole nutmeg is a generous quarter-teaspoon grated; it is meant to be noticeable in a white sauce this plain.
- The onions and parsleyThe recipe does not say how the onions are cut; taken whole they act as flavouring only, in which case fish them and the parsley bunch out before dishing. Slicing them and leaving them in gives more body.
- Finishing off the heatThe final lump of butter must be stirred in with the pan off the stove. Returned to the boil, the emulsion splits and the sauce goes greasy.
- YieldFive or six as the original states, but that assumes tripe as one dish among several. As a main course with the rice, two pounds serves three or four.
A fricassee, in English cookery books of this period, means meat cooked gently in a pale sauce bound with butter, flour and cream — the opposite of a brown stew, and the standard treatment for anything the cook wanted to keep white: chicken, rabbit, veal, tripe. Tripe was cheap protein sold ready-dressed from specialist tripe shops, especially in the industrial north of England, where the trade survived well into the twentieth century; Cassell's puts it at eightpence a pound. The dictionary gives tripe a run of recipes precisely because it was a working household's ingredient, and the milk-and-cream treatment here is the genteel end of that range — the same cut that elsewhere in Britain was eaten cold with vinegar and onions, dressed up with lemon rind, nutmeg and a rice border for a middle-class table.