Soused Tripe
2 pounds of boiled tripe (honeycomb) 18 whole cloves 12 pepper-corns 1 pint of vinegar I blade of mace 18 whole allspice 1/2 teaspoonful of salt I small onion Cut the tripe into pieces about two inches long and one inch wide. Put all the other ingredients into a porcelain kettle to boil. Put the tripe in a glass or stone jar, pour the boiling vinegar over it, and stand away for forty-eight hours.
It will keep two or three weeks.
A cold pickle rather than a cooked dish: the only heat involved is the spiced vinegar poured over tripe that has already been boiled tender. Everything depends on the tripe being fully cooked before it goes in the jar.
- Start with properly cooked tripeThe recipe assumes you have boiled the tripe yourself. Supermarket honeycomb tripe is cleaned and scalded but not tender; it needs 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, until a knife goes through the honeycomb walls with no resistance. Vinegar will firm it further, so err toward softer than you think you want.
- Porcelain kettleThat means an enamelled or otherwise nonreactive pan. Boiling vinegar in bare aluminium, cast iron or unlined copper will pick up metal and off-flavours.
- Vinegar strengthUse standard 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar undiluted — the acid is the whole preservative here. Do not substitute a mild or diluted salad vinegar, and do not add water.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried lacy aril from a nutmeg. If you have only ground mace, about ¼ teaspoon comes close, though it will cloud the vinegar; tie it in muslin if that bothers you.
- Onion and spicesLeave the spices whole and the onion in a few thick slices, so they can be strained out or simply left in the jar without turning the liquid muddy. Eighteen cloves is assertive; twelve is plenty for most palates.
- Pouring hot over coldWarm the jar first, or use a canning jar, before pouring boiling vinegar in — a thrifted glass jar can crack. Make sure the tripe is fully submerged; anything above the surface will darken and spoil.
- Storage, and the one change worth making"Stand away for forty-eight hours" meant a cool cellar or larder. Refrigerate it instead, both during the 48-hour steep and afterward. The claim that it keeps two or three weeks belongs to an era of cool stone-floored pantries and daily-turned-over food; treat a week in the refrigerator as sensible, and discard it if the liquid goes cloudy or ropy.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds serves four to six as a cold plate. Drain, and serve on a hot day with brown bread and butter, mustard, or a plain green salad — this is picnic and sideboard food, not something to reheat.
Souse — from the same root as the Old French sous, a pickle or brine — was the standard way of turning tough, cheap offal into something that could be eaten cold: pig's feet, ears, head meat and tripe, held in spiced vinegar rather than in aspic or fat. Sarah Tyson Rorer's Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of summer cookery pamphlets from the last decades before domestic refrigeration, when the problem in July was not just appetite but the impossibility of keeping anything. A dish that was cooked once, pickled, and then drawn on for a fortnight without lighting the range again answered both objections at once. Honeycomb tripe, the second stomach of the ox, was among the cheapest things at a nineteenth-century butcher's, and Rorer — who ran the Philadelphia Cooking School and wrote extensively for households of modest means — was consistently interested in making such cuts respectable at table.