Home › The Principles of Cookery › Tripe, German Mode of Preparing
Tripe, German Mode of Preparing
Take a sufficient quantity of tripe, blanch and boil it till tender; then cut two or three onions small, and steam them till they are soft in a good piece of butter. Mix a thickening of milk and flour or milk and bread-crumbs to make a thick sauce. Add a sprig of marjoram, a little nutmeg, some white pepper, salt, and some chopped parsley. Stir the preparation till it boils thick and smooth. Cut the tripe into long narrow strips, and simmer it a short time in the sauce.
A plain white-sauce tripe, close to the German Kuttelsuppe family but thicker and served as a dish rather than a soup. Almost everything hinges on how long the tripe cooks before it ever meets the sauce.
- Start with dressed tripeSome Victorian cooks bought tripe green or only partly cleaned and did the scouring themselves, though a good deal was sold ready dressed. What is sold today, usually honeycomb from the second stomach, is already scalded and bleached, so the "blanch" here means a brief plunge into boiling water and a rinse to freshen it, nothing more.
- "Till tender" is a long timeEven pre-cleaned tripe needs roughly 1.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, depending on thickness and how much pre-cooking the supplier did. It should yield easily to a knife point but keep some spring; press on and it turns to mush. A pressure cooker does the same job in about 40 minutes.
- Cook it in something more than waterThe original assumes plain water. Tripe absorbs whatever it simmers in, so a pot with an onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns pays off, and the strained liquid can loosen the sauce later.
- "Steam them till they are soft"This means sweating the onions in butter over low heat with the lid on until translucent, with no browning. Colour on the onions makes the sauce grey and muddies the flavour.
- The thickeningFor about 2 lb cooked tripe, work to roughly 2 oz butter, 2 oz flour and a pint of milk (a British pint, 20 fl oz). The bread-crumb alternative is probably the older of the two methods and gives a softer, slightly grainy sauce; use about 2 oz of fine fresh crumbs in place of the flour and expect it to thicken faster.
- MarjoramA sprig of fresh marjoram infuses and is lifted out. If using dried, a quarter-teaspoon stirred in is plenty, as dried marjoram is considerably more assertive than the fresh herb.
- The final simmer is shortThe tripe is already cooked. Five to ten minutes in the sauce is enough to heat through and let it take the seasoning; longer only softens it further and risks the sauce catching or reducing too far.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities, only "a sufficient quantity of tripe"; at the 2 lb suggested above it would serve about four as a main course with boiled potatoes or bread. Season firmly at the end, since tripe is bland and swallows salt.
Tripe survives in nearly every European peasant cuisine because it was cheap and filling. Late Victorian English compilations often gather regional treatments under national headings, and the "German mode" here reflects the creamed, herb-scented style found across southern Germany and Austria, where tripe strips in a pale roux-thickened sauce with marjoram and nutmeg remain familiar; the Swabian dish is called Saure Kutteln when the sauce is soured with vinegar or wine instead. Marjoram with offal is a long-standing central European pairing, and nutmeg in a white sauce was very common in nineteenth-century kitchens. English tripe cookery of the same period ran overwhelmingly to tripe and onions in milk, so this entry is essentially that familiar dish given a herb and a spice to mark it as foreign.