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To Prepare Tripe
Empty the contents of the stomach of a fat beef; put it in boiling water, one piece at a time, to prevent getting too hot. Scrape with a sharp knife, then put it in a vessel of cold water with salt; wash thoroughly, and change the salt water every day for four or five consecutive days; when perfectly white, boil in a very clean vessel of salt water. Then put it in vinegar until you wish to use it. Cut it in pieces of three or four inches square, and fry in egg batter.--Mrs. J.H.
This is dressing, not cooking: it takes a raw beef stomach straight from slaughter through scraping, a multi-day soak, a boil and an indefinite hold in vinegar. The cleaning stages are where it fails by current standards, and no amount of frying at the end undoes them.
- The soak is the problemRaw stomach tissue sitting in salted water for four or five days, changed once daily, is described with no temperature at all, and no refrigeration was available in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Uncleaned paunch carries a heavy load of enteric bacteria, including E. coli and Salmonella, and days in weak brine at an unknown temperature may favour them rather than check them.
- The brine is unmeasured"Cold water with salt" gives no concentration. There is no salt figure here strong enough to be a cure, so the daily changes are doing nothing but rinsing — this is holding raw offal, not preserving it.
- The vinegar hold is not a pickle"Put it in vinegar until you wish to use it" specifies no acidity, no proportion, no vessel seal and no storage temperature. Cooked meat kept in an unknown acid at an unstated temperature for an unknown period is outside any safe preserving practice; a tested modern pickling or refrigeration method should be used instead.
- No cooking times anywhereNeither the boil nor the frying is timed, and tripe is dense connective tissue that needs long moist cooking to become tender. If you want to cook tripe, work from a current recipe with stated times and use tripe that has already been cleaned.
- What the ingredients mean"The stomach of a fat beef" is the stomach of a slaughtered beef animal, the tripe of commerce coming chiefly from the paunch and honeycomb; sold raw it is generally called green tripe, if sold raw at all. What a butcher or supermarket offers as tripe has been scalded, scraped and often bleached before sale, which replaces this entire procedure.
- "Egg batter"In period usage this generally means beaten egg, sometimes loosened with a little milk, rather than a leavened frying batter; the recipe itself gives no proportions.
- YieldA whole beef stomach is a very large quantity of meat, several pounds after trimming, and the recipe accordingly treats it as something held in vinegar rather than eaten at one meal.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives — hence the bare initials "Mrs. J.H." — belongs to a period when a household that killed its own beef was responsible for every part of it. Tripe, chitterlings, brains, tongue and feet all got recipes because the alternative was waste, and the long scraping-and-soaking labour described here was the price of turning the paunch into food. The aim of the repeated salt-water changes was cosmetic as much as sanitary: the standard for well-dressed tripe was that it should come out "perfectly white," and commercial tripe was later bleached for the same reason. Frying pieces in egg and fat is one familiar Anglo-American treatment of the period; the vinegar hold reflects a kitchen with no reliable cold storage, where acid was one of the few tools available for keeping cooked meat on hand.