Broiled Tripe
When buying tripe for broiling select pieces as thick as possible and preferably of the honeycomb variety. Brush on both sides with melted butter and broil quickly over a hot fire. Add more butter when on the hot platter. It goes without saying that the tripe has been purchased ready cooked, otherwise it must be boiled for at least six hours to make it thoroughly tender.
As tripe is easily digested it is a favorite meat with many persons who must eschew other and less digestible meats.
A four-line recipe that depends entirely on the state of the tripe you start with. Everything else is butter and heat.
- Start with cooked tripeThe whole dish hinges on this: broiling only browns tripe, it does not tenderize it. Much tripe sold today is "scalded" or "bleached" but still essentially raw, and needs long simmering — commonly 1½ to 3 hours for modern cleaned honeycomb, rather than the six hours the book calls for. Simmer until a knife slips through easily, then cool it before broiling.
- "Over a hot fire"A broiler on high, or a grill pan or ridged skillet over high heat. Cooked tripe is wet; pat it thoroughly dry or it will steam rather than brown. Two to four minutes a side is enough to blister and crisp the edges.
- Honeycomb, and whyHoneycomb comes from the second stomach and its pockets catch butter and char, which is why it is specified. Blanket or flat tripe from the first stomach is smoother and blander and browns less well.
- ThicknessThin tripe curls and dries out under direct heat. Look for the thickest pieces you can find, as the book advises; cut them into pieces roughly the size of a hand so they can be turned with tongs.
- ButterMelted butter goes on before broiling and again on the platter — the second addition is the sauce. Clarified butter or ghee stands up better to a hot broiler; whole butter will smoke and speck.
- Yield and servingFigure 6 to 8 oz of cooked tripe per person as a main course. Lemon, mustard, or a vinegar-and-onion dressing all cut the richness; boiled potatoes are a common accompaniment.
- On "easily digested"Period cookery graded meats by digestibility, and tripe was generally ranked among the mildest. Treat this as a period dietary belief rather than a nutritional claim.
Tripe is the stomach lining of cattle, and its long presence in cheap-cookery books has one simple cause: it was among the least expensive things a butcher sold, priced well below even the cheap cuts. That is what the recipe means by "purchased ready cooked" — in the era this book comes from, tripe dressers and market stalls sold it already prepared, which is why the author can treat six hours of boiling as a remote contingency. Broiling was one way to make an already-cooked, gelatinous, faintly bland ingredient interesting, and the same logic runs through the regional tripe dishes still cooked today: Lyonnaise tablier de sapeur breads and grills it, Philadelphia pepper pot and Norman tripes à la mode de Caen lean on spice and long stewing instead. Tripe also benefited from a widespread Victorian and Edwardian conviction, often repeated in domestic manuals, that it was uniquely gentle on the stomach.