Robert Cain
TRIPE A LA CREOLE
Cut honeycomb tripe in pieces two inches long by one-half inch wide, having three cupfuls. Put in pan and place in oven that water may be drawn out. Cook one tablespoon finely chopped in two tablespoons butter until slightly browned, add one-eighth green pepper finely chopped, one tablespoon flour, one-half cup stock, one-fourth cup drained tomatoes, and one fresh mushroom, cut in slices; then add tripe and cook five minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
Best wishes,
A short chafing-dish-style tripe, written for a cook who already had tender tripe on hand. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens before the recipe starts.
- Tripe must be tender firstHoneycomb tripe sold today is cleaned and bleached but rarely cooked through; it needs 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer in salted water, with an onion and a bay leaf, until a knife goes in easily. The five minutes at the end of this recipe is finishing time only, not cooking time.
- The oven stepThe recipe has you set the cut tripe in a dry pan in the oven so the water it carries is driven off, which keeps the sauce from thinning. No temperature or time is given, so use a moderate oven and watch it. Drain off whatever collects before the tripe goes into the pan.
- QuantityThree cupfuls of cut tripe is on the order of a pound, and tripe shrinks during the preliminary simmering, so buy more than the finished measure suggests.
- StockHalf a cup of stock means real meat stock, veal or beef. Some of the tripe cooking liquid, strained and reduced, does the job well and is what a period kitchen would have had to hand.
- One-eighth green pepperThat is about a tablespoon of fine dice. The instruction is not a misprint; the pepper is a seasoning here, not a vegetable in its own right.
- One fresh mushroomA single mushroom in a recipe of this period likely meant a larger cultivated cap than a modern button. Use two or three ordinary white mushrooms, sliced thin.
- Drained tomatoesCanned tomatoes with the juice poured off. A quarter cup of drained chopped canned tomato, or the flesh of one small ripe tomato, keeps the sauce from going watery.
- YieldServes two generously, three at a stretch, on toast or with plain boiled rice. It is a supper dish rather than a dinner course.
Tripe survived in American cookery long after other offal fell away, partly because it was cheap and partly because Philadelphia and New Orleans both built respected dishes on it. "A la Creole" in books of this period is loose shorthand for the trio of onion, green pepper and tomato finished with butter and stock, the seasoning idiom that reached the rest of the country from New Orleans and got attached to everything from eggs to rabbit. The proportions here, small measured spoonfuls, a fraction of a pepper, one mushroom, suggest the Boston Cooking School style often said to have dominated instructional cookery around 1900, which treated even a homely cut like tripe as an exercise in exact measurement.