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TRIPE, STEWED IN ITS OWN JELLY (Birming ham way)
Take some clean, fat, white tripe. Throw it into boiling water for ten minutes, drain and dry it, and cut it into pieces. Roll these up neatly, and tie them round with thin string. Put them into an earthen jar which has a closely-fitting lid, and put with them a knuckle of veal or a calf's foot, and a little salt and pepper. Place the lid on the jar, and put it in a large pan of boiling water, keep it boiling, and add more water when required. When the meat is done enough, lift out the jar without disturbing the contents, and put it in a cool place. The tripe should remain in its own jelly until wanted, when it may be taken out and dressed in various ways. It will keep for three or four days. Time to stew, eight hours or more. Probable cost, tripe, 8d. per pound.
This is a method rather than a finished dish: tripe cooked slowly in a sealed jar with a gelatinous cut, then left to set in its own liquor so it can be pulled out and dressed over the next few days. Almost everything about it still works, but the timing assumes a tripe you can no longer buy.
- The eight hours belongs to another tripeVictorian tripe was often sold only partly dressed, and needed most of a day to become tender. Tripe sold today has usually been cleaned, bleached and long-boiled at the abattoir or by the butcher; two to three hours of gentle cooking is normally enough, and eight will reduce it to threads. Test at two hours and go by feel.
- The jar in the pan is a bain-marieAn earthen jar with a tight lid, standing in boiling water, is simply a way of holding the contents just under boiling point with no evaporation. A lidded casserole or Dutch oven in a low oven does the same thing, as does a slow cooker on low; the contents should stay just below a boil throughout.
- Knuckle of veal and calf's footThese are there chiefly for the gelatine. A veal knuckle can still be ordered from a butcher; two pig's trotters, split, are easier to find and should give a firm set. Powdered gelatine is not a like-for-like substitute, since the method depends on collagen leaching out during the long cook.
- No added liquid is intentionalNothing goes into the jar but tripe, the veal, salt and pepper. The tripe and the knuckle release enough moisture to make their own liquor, which is why the jelly is concentrated enough to set. Adding stock or water defeats the recipe.
- "A cool place" means the refrigeratorThe original assumes a stone larder at perhaps 50F. Chill the jar promptly and keep it at or below 40F; the three or four days quoted is reasonable under refrigeration and unreasonable without it. The set jelly seals the surface, which is part of why it keeps at all.
- Dressed in various waysThe recipe does not say how. The usual Victorian treatments for cooked tripe were reheating in milk with onions, egging and crumbing and frying, or grilling with butter and mustard.
- Yield and quantitiesNo amounts are given at all. Two pounds of tripe with one veal knuckle or two trotters fills a two-litre jar comfortably and serves four to six once dressed. Season lightly at this stage, since the small quantity of liquor the meat gives up is concentrated.
- Probable costEightpence a pound placed tripe among the cheaper meats of the period.
Tripe was industrial-town food, and the northern and Midland manufacturing towns supported specialist tripe dressers who bought the stomachs from the slaughterhouses, cleaned and part-boiled them, and sold them ready to finish at home. That trade is the reason a dish like this could exist in a working household: the slow, foul-smelling first stages had already been done elsewhere. The named regional method here is the storage trick rather than any seasoning, and it is a sensible one for a kitchen with no ice, since the tripe emerges sealed under set jelly and can be broken into for several meals. Cassell's dates from the 1870s and was reissued for decades. Tripe consumption in Britain held up until the mid-twentieth century and then collapsed; it survives more robustly in French, Italian and Mexican cooking than in the Midlands that gave this version its name.