Beef Tripe
Clean the tripe carefully. Soak several days in salt water, then in clear water, changing several times. Cut in slices, boil perfectly done, dip in a batter of egg(beaten light), milk and flour, or sift meal over it. Fry or broil. Season with peppet and salt.
A two-stage method: long boiling to tenderize, then a coating and quick fry or broil. The hinge is the boil — batter on undercooked tripe is unpleasant, and no amount of frying will fix it.
- The multi-day soakThis assumes tripe straight from the butcher, still green and needing to be purged. Tripe sold today is already scalded, cleaned and usually bleached, so the days in brine are unnecessary. An hour or two in cold salted water, refrigerated, is enough to freshen it; if you do soak longer, keep it in the refrigerator, not on the counter.
- Which tripeHoneycomb tripe, from the second stomach, is the usual choice and the most tender. Plan on about 1 lb for two people once trimmed.
- Boil perfectly doneThat means genuinely soft — 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, depending on the cut and whether it has been par-cooked before sale. Test with a knife tip: it should meet no resistance. Salt the water and add an onion and a bay leaf, since the boiling liquid is discarded.
- Sift meal over it"Meal" in a Southern book of this date normally means cornmeal. Fine white cornmeal was the usual Southern preference; and note the recipe's "or" — the egg-milk-flour batter is the richer alternative to the meal, not an addition to it.
- Fry or broilBoiled tripe holds a lot of water. Pat the slices thoroughly dry before coating or the batter will slide off. Shallow-fry in about ¼ inch of fat, hot enough to sizzle on contact, until the coating is set and browned — three or four minutes a side. Broiled slices want a brush of butter and no batter.
- Seasoning"Peppet" is a typesetting error for pepper. Season the boiling water, the coating and the finished slices; tripe is bland all the way through and takes salt late.
- ServingServes two to three as a main dish. Vinegar, mustard sauce or a squeeze of lemon is the traditional accompaniment and cuts the richness of the fry.
Tripe was a thrift dish in nineteenth-century American households, part of the general expectation that a butchered animal yielded nothing to waste. The offal that could not be sold fresh was cleaned and preserved in brine, and older recipes like this one often open with days of soaking and changing water — whether to draw out barrel salt or simply to purge fresh tripe is not always clear. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from Virginia housekeepers and reads throughout as a book written for households that managed their own meat. Boiling then dipping in batter and frying is the standard Anglo-American treatment of tripe of the period, and it survives today in the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania German kitchens, where tripe is still sold dressed and ready for exactly this handling.