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Lyonnaise Tripe
Cook two tablespoons onion in two tablespoons butter. Add two cups cooked tripe cut in small strips; cook ten minutes. Serve on buttered toast; sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot with butter and garnish with finely chopped parsley.
A short entrée that assumes something no longer true: that tripe arrives from the butcher already boiled tender. Everything here depends on that first step happening before the recipe starts.
- "Cooked tripe" is the whole jobHoneycomb tripe sold today is usually bleached and scalded but still raw and rubbery, and needs two to three hours of gentle simmering with aromatics before it will yield to a knife. Two cups of finished strips means starting with roughly a pound of raw tripe.
- Ten minutes is a finishing timeThe brief cooking here is only to marry the tripe with the onion and butter and take on a little colour. It will not tenderise anything; tripe that is tough going into the pan will be tough coming out.
- Cut the strips smallThe recipe gives no dimensions; short batons a finger's width and an inch or two long work well, so they crisp at the edges rather than steaming in a slab.
- Get the onion rightTwo tablespoons of chopped onion is modest for two cups of tripe. Cook it slowly in the butter until soft and just golden before the tripe goes in; a scorched onion will dominate the dish.
- Butter and heatTwo tablespoons of butter over ten minutes will brown and may burn if the pan runs hot. Moderate heat, or a spoonful of neutral oil alongside the butter, keeps the milk solids from turning bitter.
- YieldTwo cups of tripe on toast serves two as a main course or four as a small entrée.
- A modern habit worth borrowingFrench versions of tripes a la lyonnaise are commonly finished with a splash of wine vinegar off the heat. The book omits it; the acid cuts the richness.
Lyon built a reputation on offal, and tripe cooked with onions is one of the dishes that made it famous: "à la lyonnaise" attached to almost anything means onions cooked in butter, whether the dish is potatoes, eggs, or tripe. Its appearance in a cook book is unremarkable: tripe was cheap, widely sold, and treated as an ordinary weekday protein rather than an adventure, and cookery books routinely list it among entrées beside sweetbreads and calf's liver. The recipe's brevity is striking. It seems to assume a reader who buys tripe already boiled from a butcher or market stall, a convenience that has largely disappeared in English-speaking countries and that may account for the dish's near-vanishing from home kitchens.