Tripe, to Dress
INGREDIENTS. - Tripe, onion sauce, milk and water. AVERAGE COST, 7d. per pound.
Ascertain that the tripe is quite fresh, and have it cleaned and dressed. Cut away the coarsest fat, and boil it in equal proportions of milk and water for hour.
TROUT, STEWED.
Should the tripe be entirely undressed, more than double that time should be allowed for it. Have ready some onion sauce, made by our given recipe, dish the tripe, smother it with the sauce, and the remainder send to table in a turees.. TIME. hour; for undressed tripe, from 2 to 3 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note.-Tripe may be dressed in a variety of ways: it may be cut in pieces and fried in batter, stewed in gravy with mushrooms, or cut into collops, sprinkled with minced onion and savoury herbs, and fried a nice brown in clarified butter.
A plain Victorian treatment of tripe: gently simmered in milk and water, then buried under onion sauce. The whole dish depends on what condition the tripe arrives in.
- Dressed versus undressed"Dressed" tripe was sold already cleaned and part-boiled by the tripe dresser, needing only about an hour's finishing. Tripe sold today is generally bleached and pre-cleaned, but how far it has been cooked varies from supplier to supplier; unless it is sold ready-cooked, plan on 2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering until a knife slides through easily.
- The cooking timeThe stated time for dressed tripe has lost its fraction in this entry and reads simply as "hour"; since the undressed time of 2 to 3 hours is described as "more than double", the intended figure was probably about an hour. Judge by texture rather than the clock, as thickness varies considerably between honeycomb and blanket tripe.
- Milk and waterEqual parts whole milk and water is not arbitrary. The milk softens the flavour and keeps the tripe pale; it will catch and scorch if the pan is allowed to boil hard, so keep it at a bare tremble and stir occasionally.
- Onion sauceThe sauce referred to is a white sauce (butter, flour, milk) with onions boiled soft and either sieved or chopped fine and stirred in. Some of the tripe cooking liquor can replace part of the milk in the sauce.
- "A turees"This is a tureen: the extra sauce goes to the table separately so diners can add more. A warmed jug does the same job.
- Cost note7d. per pound was pence in pre-decimal currency and is of historical interest only. Tripe remains inexpensive where a butcher stocks it, though many now sell it frozen.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Allow 6 to 8 oz of tripe per person as a main course, with about a pint of onion sauce for four.
- The alternatives in the noteAll three variations assume the tripe has already been simmered tender. Frying raw tripe in batter or in clarified butter will produce something rubbery; boil first, cool, then cut and fry.
Tripe, the stomach lining of cattle, was one of the cheapest forms of meat protein in nineteenth-century Britain, and the trade had its own specialist: the tripe dresser, who scalded, scraped, bleached and part-boiled the offal before it reached the shop. That division of labour explains the whole shape of this entry, which quotes two wildly different cooking times depending on whether the cook bought tripe ready-dressed or raw. Tripe and onions became strongly associated with the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where tripe shops survived into the twentieth century, and the milk-and-onion pairing here is essentially that dish written down for a middle-class household. The variations in the closing note, fried in batter or as collops in clarified butter, show that Mrs Beeton expected tripe to appear often enough to need ringing the changes.