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Tripe, Normandy Way of Dressing
Clean, scald, and scrape one pound and a half of tripe repeatedly, cut it into neat squares, and put it into a stewpan with a large carrot, an onion stuck with two cloves, three ounces of bacon cut into dice, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, and six or eight peppercorns. Add one or two ounces of fat, and cover the whole with cider, white wine, or, failing these, cold spring water. Let the tripe simmer very gently till it is quite tender. Place it on a dish, and pour the strained sauce over it. Time, about two hours.
A pared-down cousin of tripe à la mode de Caen, written for a kitchen where tripe arrived raw and needed hours of attention. Most of the adjustments concern the state the tripe reaches you in, and how long it really wants.
- Tripe as sold todayAlmost all tripe in Britain and the US is sold dressed and bleached, meaning it has already been scalded, scraped and part-boiled. The repeated cleaning and scraping in the original applies to green (raw) tripe from a butcher; dressed tripe needs only a rinse.
- The two hours is a floor, not a ceilingDressed honeycomb tripe will be tender in about two to three hours of gentle simmering. Green tripe may want considerably longer. Test with a knife tip rather than a clock: it should be yielding and slightly gelatinous, never squeaky.
- Keep it barely movingA hard boil toughens tripe and turns the fat cloudy. The surface should shiver, not bubble. A low oven at 300F with the lid on is easier to hold steady than a burner.
- Cider means dry ciderSweet bottled cider will make the sauce cloying. Use a dry French or English cider, or a dry white wine. Water works, as the recipe says, but the dish loses most of its character.
- The fatOne or two ounces of fat means lard, beef dripping or butter. Its purpose is to enrich a lean cut; with fatty bacon in the pot you can use the lower figure.
- BaconThree ounces of bacon cut into dice means unsmoked streaky or a piece of pancetta. Heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the pot.
- The strained sauce needs helpAfter straining you will have a thin, well-flavoured liquid rather than a sauce. Reduce it hard for ten minutes, or add a split calf's foot or a piece of pork rind to the pot at the start so it sets to a light gelatin, as the Caen original does.
- YieldA pound and a half of tripe serves three as a main course, four as part of a larger meal. Serve hot, with boiled potatoes.
Tripe cooked slowly with cider, root vegetables and a bouquet is the signature dish of Normandy, best known as tripes à la mode de Caen, where the tripe is traditionally sealed into an earthenware tripière with a flour-and-water paste and left overnight in the falling heat of a bread oven. Calvados and a calf's foot usually go in as well, neither of which Cassell's admits here; what remains is the essential Norman logic of the dish, which is that a region with apples and no vineyards braises in cider. Tripe was cheap offal and appears throughout Victorian household books for that reason, commonly boiled with milk and onions in what was generally thought of as the English manner, so a French treatment like this one signals a cook with some ambition. The custom of finishing the pot in a communal or baker's oven is often said to be why the dish is associated with a whole town rather than a single kitchen.