Tripe
The moment the tripe is taken out, wash it thoroughly in many cold waters. (If you have quick-lime, sift it over the dark inner coat, and instantly scrape off the coat.) Cut it in four parts. Have ready boiling water, dip and scrape until it becomes quite white. Prepare weak brine with a considerable mixture of meal; let it soak a day. Continue to shift it every day, and every other day scrape it; this must be done for a week, and then make nice gruel, in which it must be well boiled, first tying it up in a cloth. When boiled, take it out of the cloth, and lay it in a weak brine for a night, after which it may be put with the feet.--Mrs. R.
This is not a cooking recipe so much as a dressing recipe: it takes the stomach of a freshly killed animal and turns it into the pale, scrubbed tripe a cook could then use. Nearly every stage of it falls outside what can be done safely in a domestic kitchen now, and the terms it uses need decoding before the problems are even visible.
- Quick-lime is not a food ingredientQuick-lime is calcium oxide, a caustic that slakes exothermically with water and burns skin, eyes and mucous membranes. The recipe has it sifted dry onto the dark inner coat to loosen it before scraping; whatever role lime has played in commercial tripe dressing, sifting it over meat on a kitchen table is not a controlled condition.
- A week of raw offal at room temperatureThe instruction is to soak the tripe in weak brine for seven days, shifting it daily and scraping it every other. No strength of brine is given, no temperature, and no refrigeration is implied. Green tripe carries a heavy load of gut flora, and a weak unmeasured brine held at ambient temperature is a growth medium, not a preservative.
- "Weak brine" means nothing measurableCuring safety depends on knowing the salt concentration and the holding temperature. Neither is stated here, and the recipe cannot be reconstructed into anything verifiable. This is why the page is worth reading rather than following.
- The moment the tripe is taken outThe opening words presuppose that the stomach comes to the cook fresh from the animal rather than from a market, which is what makes the rest of the sequence intelligible and what no longer stands behind it.
- Meal and gruel'Meal' in a Virginia book of this date is most likely cornmeal, and the 'nice gruel' of the final boil a thin meal-and-water porridge. The recipe does not say what either is for, though tying the tripe in a cloth would at least keep it from breaking up in the pot.
- "Put with the feet"A cross-reference rather than an ingredient: the dressed tripe is to join the feet dealt with elsewhere in the book, presumably to be pickled or soused with them. The recipe ends where that one begins.
- What to do insteadTripe sold in markets today is already scalded, bleached and dressed, and needs only rinsing and long simmering. Use a current recipe for cooking it; nothing on this page needs to be repeated.
Household books of the nineteenth-century South were written for kitchens attached to farms, where the cook met the animal rather than the cut, and a great many pages in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) deal with the first hours after slaughter — scalding, scraping, salting, souse. Tripe is the ruminant stomach, most often the honeycomb second chamber, and it reaches the kitchen full of digesta and dark membrane; every traditional dressing method is some combination of scalding water, alkali and mechanical scraping, which is exactly the sequence Mrs. R. sets out. Lime bleaching of tripe is old and widespread and survived into industrial practice, and the darker, unbleached kind is still sold in parts of Europe. Marion Cabell Tyree assembled the book from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why the instruction ends with an attribution and assumes the reader already owns a souse tub.