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Tripe Pie
Tripe which is to be used for a pie should be stewed, and allowed to jelly in the liquor in which it was boiled. Line the inside of a pie-dish with good pastry. Put a slice of tender steak or a little undressed ham at the bottom of the dish, and place upon this the tripe with the jellied gravy adhering to it. Season with pepper and salt, place little pieces of butter here and there on the meat, and pour in two or three spoonfuls of good brown gravy. Cover the dish with a good crust, and bake the pie in a well-heated oven. When the pastry is sufficiently cooked the pie is done. Time to bake, according to size. Probable cost, tripe, 8d. per pound.
A Victorian pie built on the assumption that tripe arrives at the kitchen raw and must be stewed for hours first. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of the tripe's texture and the pie's internal temperature.
- Stew the tripe first, without exceptionThe instruction to stew the tripe and let it set in its own liquor is the hinge of the recipe. Tripe put into a pie only part-tender stays rubbery no matter how long the pastry bakes, since the oven cannot supply the long moist heat that breaks down its collagen. Simmer until a knife goes through with no resistance, then chill in the cooking liquid so the gelatin sets around it.
- What tripe you can buy nowTripe sold in Britain and the US today is generally dressed and part-boiled, which shortens but does not eliminate the stewing. Honeycomb (the second stomach) is the usual choice and holds sauce well; blanket or plain tripe is coarser and tends to want longer. Uncleaned 'green' tripe is rarely sold for the table now, and would need long cooking and several changes of water.
- "Undressed ham"This means raw, uncooked ham or gammon, not cooked ham off a slicer. A thin slice of raw gammon or a few rashers of unsmoked bacon at the base of the dish give the same salt and fat. If you use cured cooked ham, cut the added salt.
- "A well-heated oven"The recipe gives no temperature and no time, only 'according to size'. A modern reading would be a hot oven, roughly 425F/220C to set and colour the pastry, dropped to about 375F/190C to finish, with a deep-dish pie likely needing something in the region of an hour.
- The steak is the timing problemA slice of raw steak beneath the tripe may not be cooked through in the time the crust takes to brown. Either cut it thin, or brown it briefly in a pan first, and check that the filling is hot right through to the centre (at least 145F/63C for a whole cut of beef).
- The jellied gravyThe set jelly clinging to the tripe melts in the oven and is the pie's sauce. Do not rinse it off, and add only the two or three spoonfuls of brown gravy called for, or the filling floods and the bottom crust goes to paste.
- SeasoningTripe is bland, and pepper and salt alone make a dull pie. Onion softened in butter, a blade of mace or a grating of nutmeg, and chopped parsley are common in other Victorian tripe dishes, but they are additions to this recipe, which seasons with pepper and salt only.
- Yield and priceA pie dish of this kind would serve about four. The eightpence a pound is pre-decimal currency and marks tripe as an inexpensive meat, though not demonstrably the cheapest on the slab, and it is no longer cheap in every market.
Tripe was one of the great cheap proteins of nineteenth-century Britain, and the trade in it was industrial in scale: tripe dressers in Lancashire and Yorkshire bought stomachs from slaughterhouses, scoured, boiled and bleached them, and sold them ready to cook in dedicated tripe shops. The pie itself follows the standard Victorian pattern for a meat pie: a well-flavoured foundation of steak or raw ham at the bottom to supply fat and savour, a bland principal meat above it, and only a little added gravy because the jellied stock is expected to do the work. Boiled tripe with onions remained a familiar northern English supper well into the twentieth century, though the pie form is now rare outside of home cooking.