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Tripe, with Tomatoes and Spinach
Take two pounds of boiled tripe cut into pieces ready for serving. Press the contents of a quart tin of tomatoes through a colander into a saucepan; add salt and pepper after the pulp has boiled up; squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and add a Spanish onion, first chopped very small and scalded. Boil for ten minutes. Then thicken with an ounce of flour and butter, lay in the tripe, and in a quarter of an hour or so serve it, with some plainly-cooked spinach in little heaps round the dish. A poached egg may be laid upon each bed of spinach, with little rolls of fried bacon in between each bed. Probable cost, 2s. 4d.
A late-Victorian assembly dish: the tripe is already cooked before it meets the sauce, so the recipe is really a tomato sauce and a plating scheme. Sourcing and pre-cooking the tripe is the whole job.
- Start with properly cooked tripe"Boiled tripe" is assumed, not explained. Dressed tripe as sold today generally still needs simmering in water or milk with an onion, anywhere from about 1½ to 3 hours depending on how far it has already been cooked, until a knife goes through with no resistance, before it is cut for serving. Honeycomb tripe is a common choice.
- A quart tin of tomatoesAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, a little over a litre, so the tin is larger than one standard 400 g can; roughly two 400 g tins, or a single large 800 g tin plus a little more. Pressing through a colander removes seeds and skin, which mattered more when tinned tomatoes came in coarse pieces; a food mill or a sieve does the same, or use passata.
- An ounce of flour and butterThe phrasing is ambiguous: it may mean an ounce of each, or an ounce of the two together, worked to a paste and stirred into the boiling sauce in small pieces. An ounce of butter is about 2 tablespoons; an ounce of flour about 3½. Either way it is an uncooked butter-and-flour paste rather than a cooked roux, so let the sauce simmer a few minutes afterwards to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Scalding the onionChopped Spanish onion is poured over with boiling water and drained before it goes in. That takes the harsh edge off raw onion in a sauce that only cooks ten minutes; a brief sweat in butter achieves the same and tastes better.
- The reheating timeA quarter of an hour in the sauce is for warming through and letting the tripe take on flavour, not for tenderising. Tripe that is still tough at this stage will not soften in fifteen minutes, which is why the initial simmer cannot be shortened.
- Lemon and salt at the endSalt and pepper go in only after the pulp has boiled up, and the lemon after that. Tinned tomatoes vary enormously in acidity and salt now, so taste before adding either, and hold back some of the lemon.
- Assembly and yieldThe recipe gives no yield; two pounds of tripe with eggs, bacon and spinach would serve about four to six. The spinach heaps, poached eggs and bacon rolls all need to be ready at the same moment; cook the spinach and bacon while the tripe warms, and poach the eggs last.
- Probable cost2s. 4d. is the book's costing for the whole dish, an indication of how cheap offal was relative to meat in the period rather than any useful modern figure.
Tripe was one of the great cheap proteins of nineteenth-century Britain, sold by dedicated tripe dressers who cleaned and boiled it before it reached the buyer, which is why a book like Cassell's can begin a recipe with "two pounds of boiled tripe" and feel no need to say more. The classic English treatment was tripe and onions in milk, plain and northern; this version belongs to the later Victorian appetite for tomato sauces, which spread as tinned tomatoes became a familiar grocery item. The finish, with heaps of spinach, poached eggs and rolled bacon, reflects the era's fondness for the composed platter, and shows a cook dressing up an inexpensive cut to make it fit for a dinner table. It is an illustration of how a well-made sauce can carry an ingredient that has little flavour of its own.