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Broiled Honeycomb Tripe
Wash tripe and cut in pieces for serving. Cover with boiling water and cook until tender. Drain, wipe, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and broil over a clear fire. Serve with maître d'hôtel butter.
Tripe Ragoût Wash one pound of tripe and cut in two-inch strips for serving. Sauté in two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons onion, add tripe, cook ten minutes, add one cup each of tomato and celery cut into inch pieces, and simmer until all are tender. Serve, garnished with toast points.
Two tripe preparations run together in one entry: a plain broil and a small ragoût. Both assume the cook already knows that tripe is a long-boil ingredient before it is anything else.
- The hinge: pre-boil until genuinely tender"Cook until tender" is doing all the work here. Honeycomb tripe simmered at a bare bubble takes roughly 1½ to 3 hours depending on how it was processed; it should yield easily to a knife tip before it goes anywhere near a broiler. Undercooked tripe broils into something inedible and no amount of butter fixes it.
- Tripe todayTripe now sold in the United States is generally sold already scalded and cleaned, often bleached, so the heavy scrubbing and multiple water changes the period assumed are unnecessary. Green (uncleaned) tripe is sold as pet food and is not for the table. Rinse well, and if the smell is assertive a first blanch in fresh water for ten minutes helps.
- "A clear fire"A fire burnt down past the flames to steady glowing coals, with no smoke. A gas or electric broiler set high, with the rack close, does the same job. You are only browning and blistering the surface; three to four minutes a side is enough.
- Maître d'hôtel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — roughly a tablespoon of parsley and two teaspoons of lemon to four tablespoons of butter. Chill it, slice a coin onto the hot tripe, and let it melt at the table.
- The ragoût's garbled lineThe ragoût's compressed line -- "Sauté in two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons onion, add tripe" is elliptical rather than clear. Read it as: melt the butter, soften the chopped onion in it, then add the tripe and cook ten minutes.
- Tripe for the ragoût is also pre-cookedThe ten minutes in butter and the later simmer will not tenderise raw tripe. Boil the pound until tender first, then cut into two-inch strips and proceed. The tomato and celery need only twenty minutes or so to come together.
- YieldA pound of tripe will serve about two as a main course, or more as a small entrée course; the recipe itself gives no yield. Toast points are simply crustless toast cut on the diagonal.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounds its confectionery with a full general-purpose kitchen manual. Tripe belongs to that general section by economic logic: the second stomach of a cow, honeycombed and cheap, was standard American market fare well into the twentieth century, eaten pickled, fried in batter, stewed in milk, or — as here — simply broiled over coals and dressed with a compound butter. The maître d'hôtel butter and the toast points signal the book's ambition rather than the ingredient's status: French service vocabulary applied to offal was arguably one way an entrée course could be made respectable in a middle-class household. Tripe's near-disappearance from American home cooking is a post-war development; in 1907 it needed no more introduction than liver did.