Marie Dressler
PHILADELPHIA PEPPER POT
1/4 cup sliced onion 1/4 cup chopped celery 1/4 cup chopped green peppers 4 tablespoons butter 3½ tablespoons flour 5 cups white stock III ½ cup heavy cream ½ lb. honeycomb tripe, cut in cubes 1½ cups potato cubes ½ teaspoon peppercorns finely pounded 3/4 tablespoon salt Cook vegetables in three tablespoons butter fifteen minutes; add flour and stir until well mixed; then add remaining ingredients except cream. Cover and let cook one hour. Just before serving add cream and remaining butter.
Yours very truly,
A straightforward soup once the tripe question is settled — everything else is a butter-and-flour base with stock, potato and cream. The tripe is the hinge: an hour is not enough unless it has already been tenderized.
- Tripe, and how long it really needsHoneycomb tripe sold today is bleached and cleaned but rarely fully tender. Simmer it separately in salted water until a knife goes through easily — commonly two to three hours — then cube it and add it to the soup, where the stated hour will finish the job. Tripe added raw to a one-hour pot stays rubbery.
- White stockThe numbered cross-reference presumably points to a basic stock recipe elsewhere in the book; 'white stock' conventionally means veal or chicken bones simmered with aromatics and no browning. A light chicken stock is the closest modern substitute. Use unsalted, since the recipe adds its own salt.
- The flour quantityThe printed figure reads as 1½ tablespoons, which gives only a very light thickening for 5 cups of stock plus cream. Three to four tablespoons gives a soup that lightly coats a spoon; more than that turns it into a chowder.
- SaltThree quarters of a tablespoon is a bit over 2 teaspoons, which is reasonable for 6 cups of liquid only if the stock is unsalted. Add half at the start and correct at the end.
- PeppercornsPepper pot should taste distinctly hot. The recipe calls for the peppercorns finely pounded; grinding coarsely and adding a portion at the end keeps more of the pepper's aroma, which fades over an hour of cooking.
- Cream at the endHolding back the cream and the last tablespoon of butter until serving is sensible practice: prolonged simmering does the dairy no favours. Warm the soup through after adding, but do not return it to a boil.
- PotatoesCut them at about half an inch. Added at the start, as written, they will cook well past firm in an hour; if you want them intact, put them in for the last twenty-five minutes.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield; 5 cups of stock and 1½ cups of cream, plus tripe, potato and vegetables, make well over six cups — enough for several generous bowls as a main course with bread.
Philadelphia pepper pot is a tripe-and-pepper soup generally traced to West Indian and West African cookery, brought into the city's markets and cook shops by Caribbean and Black Philadelphian cooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the familiar story tying it to Washington's army at Valley Forge is patriotic legend rather than documented history. By the nineteenth century it was street food, sold by criers whose call — "pepper pot, smoking hot" — was a fixture of the city, and it made the leap into printed cookbooks as a respectable regional dish thickened with flour and enriched with cream, which is the version here. Its appearance in a book of stars' recipes is telling: tripe was cheap, and pepper pot rather than lobster sat easily alongside Dressler's screen persona as an unglamorous working woman.