Meats: Tripe
Tripe à la Creole (Southern recipe). 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 12 peppercorns, 2 cloves, 1 blade mace, 1 onion chopped fine, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 1½ cupfuls strained tomato, pound boiled tripe.
Put into a saucepan the butter, peppercorns, cloves, mace, and onion chopped fine. Cook slowly until the butter is light brown; add the flour, and brown again. Strain, and return to the fire. Season to taste; add the boiled tripe, cut into inch strips; cover, and simmer gently for twenty minutes.
Curried Tripe (Southern recipe). 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 finely chopped onion, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 cupful stewed tomato, 1½ pounds boiled tripe, Curry powder, pepper, and salt, 1 cupful beef stock.
Melt the butter in a spider; add the onion; cook until colored; add the flour and brown it; stir in the beef stock and tomatoes. Add the boiled tripe, cut into strips, season with sal pepper, and a little curry powder.
Simmer gently for ten minutes, and serve.
Tripe Lyonnaise (French recipe). 2 pounds tripe, 1 tablespoonful butter, Slice onion, Salt and pepper. ) Cut the tripe in thin strips. Put the butter in a frying pan; when hot, add the onion, and fry light brown. Turn in the tripe, add a little salt and pepper. Cook gently until tender. Thicken the gravy with flour.
Tripe à l'Espagnole (French recipe). 3 tablespoonfuls oil, cupful finely chopped onion, finely chopped green pepper, 1 bruised clove garlic, cupful finely chopped mushrooms, 11 pounds tripe, 1 teaspoonful salt, ½ teaspoonful pepper, 2 finely cut tomatoes, 1 teaspoonful flour, 1 cupful boiling water, 1 teaspoonful beef extract, 1 teaspoonful parsley. finely chopped Place the oil in a saucepan over the fire, add the onion, pepper, and gar- MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK lic; cook five minutes without browning. Wash and cut the tripe into inch-sized pieces, season with salt and pepper; mix the tripe with the seasoning; add it to vegetables in the saucepan, cover, and cook ten minutes; add the tomatoes, seasoning and mushrooms, cook five minutes; dust with flour, add boiling water and beef extract, cook a few minutes longer.
Serve, sprinkled with parsley.
Stewed Tripe and Tomato Sauce. 1 pound tripe, 1 onion cut in slices, 2 cupfuls tomatoes, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 cupful cold water, Salt and pepper.
Wash the tripe, cover with hot water; add the onion, cover the saucepan, and cook slowly half an hour. In another saucepan put the tomatoes, cook ten minutes; strain through a sieve and return to the pan. Wet the flour with the water; add it to the strained tomatoes, stirring all the time. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Place the tripe on a hot platter and pour the sauce over.
Tripe with Oysters.
Simmer pound tripe for three quarters of an hour in slightly salted water; take out the tripe; add to the water in which the tripe was cooked a little butter, flour, salt, and pepper. Return the tripe and a dozen oysters, simmer until the oysters are cooked, and serve.
Tripe and Onions (English recipe). 1 pound tripe, 2 onions, 1 cupful milk, tablespoonful flour, Pepper and salt.
Parboil the tripe, and cut into small pieces. Parboil the onions, and cut in rings. Put them both in a saucepan with boiling water and a little salt. Simmer gently from an hour and a half to two hours. Mix the flour and milk smoothly; when the tripe is tender, pour it in. Let it come to the boil, and serve very hot.
Beef Heart Sauté.
Soak a beef heart in cold water an hour, changing the water several times to draw out all the blood.
Cover with boiling water, add 1 teaspoonful salt, and simmer gently two hours. Set aside until cold. Cut into half-inch slices and take out the tough muscle in the center. Dip each slice in slightly beaten egg, with which has been mixed salt and pepper, teaspoonful onion juice, and 2 teaspoonfuls warm water; roll in dry bread crumbs, and stand ten minutes. Fry golden brown in deep fat. In a frying pan melt 1 tablespoonful butter; when brown, add 1 tablespoonful flour, and brown again. Add gradually cupful water in which the heart was cooked, 4 cupful vinegar from piccalilli, and 1 tablespoonful pickle chopped fine; salt and pepper to taste. Simmer two or three minutes.
Stewed Beef's Heart (English recipe). 1 beef heart, 1 cupful bread crumbs, 3 slices salt pork minced, Salt and pepper, 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley, teaspoonful sweet marjoram, teaspoonful chopped onion, 2 teaspoonfuls melted butter, 1 tablespoonful browned flour, lemon.
Wash the heart thoroughly and soak two hours in cold water slightly salted. Stuff with forcemeat made of bread crumbs, salt pork, salt, pepper, parsley, sweet marjoram, and onion.
Moisten with melted butter. Fill the heart with this, sew up the opening, and tie firmly in a piece of cloth.
Put in a saucepan, nearly cover with boiling water, and stew gently for three hours. The water should by this time be reduced to a pint. Take out the heart, remove cloth and dish.
MEATS Set aside a cup of gravy and thicken what is left in the saucepan with butter rubbed smooth in browned flour. Salt and pepper to taste. After taking from the fire, add the lemon juice, and pour over the meat. Carve in slices across the top.
Beef Kidney à la Baden-Baden (German recipe). 1 beef kidney, 2 tablespoonfuls butter 1 tablespoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful pepper, 2 tablespoonfuls finely cut mushrooms, Yolks 2 eggs, 1 cupful sweet cream.
Split the kidney in half; remove the white fat and all stringy parts; cut the kidney in four-inch squares.
Place a saucepan over the fire, add the butter, and as soon as hot, put in the kidney; season with salt and pepper, stir, and cook five minutes; add the mushrooms, cook six minutes.
Mix the yolks of the eggs with the cream; add to the kidneys; stir and beat till nearly boiling; add a little cayenne pepper, and serve.
Hungarian Kidney. 1 beef kidney, 1½ tablespoonfuls butter, teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful white pepper, 4 tablespoonfuls beef stock, 1 tablespoonful chopped mushrooms, Yolks 2 eggs, cupful milk.
Wash the kidney, and with a sharp knife cut off the outer part of each lobe, rejecting the purplish portion and tubes. In a saucepan put the butter, salt, and pepper. When hot, add the kidney; shake, and cook for five minutes; add the beef stock and mushrooms; simmer for ten minutes; mix the eggs and milk, add to the contents of the saucepan, stir until the sauce begins to thicken; then take from the fire, and serve in a hot dish.
Broiled Kidneys (Scotch recipe).
Cut the kidneys in slices, soak an hour in salted water, wipe them dry, dip in beaten egg, then in crumbs, and broil over a hot fire.
Frizzled Dried Beef.
Cover dried beef with hot water to take out the salt; throw this water away, and put the beef into a sauce< pan with a few tablespoonfuls boiling water; let it simmer; add a little butter, put the beef on slices of toast and pour a thin tomato sauce over them.
Fricassee of Oxtails.
Wash and clean 2 small oxtails, cut them in pieces two inches long, put them into stock, and simmer until tender. Do this the day before they are to be used. Dip them in beaten eggs and crumbs, season with salt and pepper, and fry light brown. For the sauce, thicken the stock the oxtails were cooked in with flour, pour over the meat, and serve.
Savory Oxtail (Mexican recipe). 2 oxtails, 8 onions, Clove bruised garlic, 1 tablespoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful pepper, 1 carrot, 2 turnips, 2 sweet potatoes, 4 potatoes, 1 cupful Lima beans, 5 tablespoonfuls butter.
Cut oxtails into pieces, scald in boiling water and cool in cold water; place a saucepan with butter over the fire, add onions and garlic; cook three minutes; drain the meat and season with salt and pepper; stir, and cook six minutes; then cover with boiling water and cook two hours. Add carrot, turnips, sweet potatoes, onions, and potatoes; cover, and cook till nearly done; then add the Lima beans described below: Soak 1 cupful Lima beans in cold water over night, place them over the fire with cold water, add a little salt, and boil till MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK tender; melt 1 tablespoonful butter in a small saucepan, stir, and cook two minutes; add 1 pint broth, cook a few minutes; then add to the stew; cook a few minutes, and serve. place of butter, the Spanish people use oil.
In Creamed Frankforts (German recipe). 1 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 cupful milk, Pepper and salt, 4 Frankfort sausages.
Make a cream sauce of butter, flour, and milk. Season with salt and pepper. Skin Frankfort sausages, cut into pieces an inch long, and bring to a boiling point in the sauce STELLA A. DOWNING
A run of organ-meat and offal dishes from the same chapter. Most of them assume the cook has already boiled the tripe, and that a beef heart or kidney comes home whole and untrimmed from the butcher — both of which need a word before you start.
- "Boiled tripe" is the hidden first step"Boiled tripe" is the hidden first step in two of these -- Tripe a la Creole and Curried Tripe both call for meat already cooked, while the others start from raw and build in their own simmering. Honeycomb tripe sold today is cleaned and often bleached, and may be sold raw or partly scalded; raw tripe needs 1 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer in salted water, with a bay leaf and an onion, until a knife goes through with no resistance. Only then does the 10- or 20-minute finishing time in the Creole and curried versions make sense.
- Tripe and Onions is the exceptionTripe and Onions starts from parboiled tripe and then gives it a further hour and a half to two hours of simmering, which is the honest total. Do not shorten it on the assumption that the parboil did the work.
- Tripe with OystersAdd the oysters at the very end and count 1 to 2 minutes, until the edges just ruffle. "Simmer until the oysters are cooked" can easily be taken further than it needs to be; longer and they shrink and turn rubbery.
- A spiderAn old name for a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs to stand over coals. Any heavy skillet does.
- Blade mace and peppercornsMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed; whole "blades" are still sold by spice merchants, and roughly 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace stands in for one blade. Since the Creole sauce is strained before the tripe goes in, whole spices are the point -- if you use ground, skip the straining.
- Beef extractMeaning the concentrated pastes of the period, Liebig's or Bovril. A teaspoon of beef bouillon paste, or ½ a stock cube crushed, gives the same effect in the Espagnole.
- Trimming heart and kidneyThe long cold-water soaks are for flavour, not safety: they draw out blood and the ammoniac edge from kidney. Change the water two or three times. In the heart, cut out the central tough muscle and any valve tissue after the initial simmer, as directed; in beef kidney, cut away the white core and all tubes.
- Egg-thickened kidney saucesIn both the Baden-Baden and Hungarian kidneys the yolks must not boil. Take the pan off the heat as the sauce thickens and coats a spoon; a few seconds too long and it curdles into scrambled egg.
- Vinegar from piccalilliSimply the pickling liquid drained off a jar of mustard pickle. Any sharp pickle brine, or cider vinegar with a little of the chopped pickle, serves for the sauce in Beef Heart Sauté.
- Frizzled dried beefModern chipped or dried beef is far less salty than the barrel-cured product this assumes. Taste before soaking; a brief rinse is often enough, and a long soak leaves it flavourless.
- YieldA pound of tripe with sauce serves two to three as a main course. The Mexican oxtail stew, with two tails and all the root vegetables, will feed six to eight.
Tripe, heart, kidney and oxtail were cheap, and cheapness was the whole argument for them: a household book of this era treated the fifth quarter of the animal as a matter of thrift and duty, not of adventurous eating. What is striking in this run is how the same tough cut is given a nationality — Creole, Lyonnaise, Espagnole, English, Scotch, German, Mexican — which was the fashionable way American cookbooks of the period signalled range and worldliness to a middle-class reader. The French and English claims are the soundest of them: tripes à la lyonnaise, sliced with onions and browned in butter, is a real Lyon dish, and tripe and onions in milk is genuinely northern English, long associated with Lancashire and the industrial towns where tripe dressers kept their own shops. Long boiling is not an old-fashioned excess here but a necessity, since tripe is nearly all collagen and only becomes tender when that collagen has had hours to turn to gelatin.