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Tripe in Batter
Cut cooked tripe in three-inch strips. Soak ten minutes in olive oil. Drain, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in Fritter Batter, and fry in deep fat.
A short recipe that assumes two things the modern cook has to supply: fully cooked tripe and a batter from elsewhere in the book. Both are worth sorting out before the fat goes on.
- "Cooked tripe" is the whole jobSupermarket honeycomb tripe is scalded and bleached, not cooked; it still needs 1.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer with aromatics until a knife slides through with no resistance. Underdone tripe fried in batter is rubbery and no amount of frying will fix it.
- Cool and dry it firstLet the simmered tripe cool completely, then blot it thoroughly. Wet tripe will not hold the oil marinade and will make the batter slide off in the fat.
- The oil soakTen minutes in olive oil is a flavour and adhesion step, not a tenderiser. Drain well; excess oil thins the batter where it touches.
- Fritter batterThe recipe sends you to a fritter batter given elsewhere in the book; period fritter batters of this kind are generally a plain flour-egg-milk coating, sometimes with a little salt and leavening. A beer batter or a thin tempura-style batter works equally well here.
- Deep fat temperatureFry at 365-375F. The tripe is already cooked, so you are after colour and a set crust only: 2 to 3 minutes, turning once, in small batches so the fat does not drop below 350F.
- Strips and yieldThe recipe gives three-inch strips; cutting them about an inch wide makes them easiest to handle. No quantity or yield is stated, so scale to appetite; serve immediately with lemon, tartare sauce or a sharp tomato sauce.
Tripe held a respectable place on American tables well into the twentieth century, and Boston in particular had a long taste for it, sold pickled by the barrel and eaten broiled, creamed, or, as here, fried in batter. Frying in a coating is the standard nineteenth-century strategy for organ meats and other economical cuts: the batter supplies crispness and richness that the meat itself lacks, and the same treatment appears in period books for brains, sweetbreads and calf's feet. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and while its reason for existing was to sell cocoa, Maria Willett Howard filled it out as a complete general cookbook — hence a plain entree like this one sitting a few pages from the chocolate work.