Pepper Pot
3 pounds tripe. 2 quarts water. Small knuckle of veal Water to cover veal 2 potatoes 1 chopped onion 1/2 tablespoon sweet marjoram 1/2 bunch parsley and thyme Salt and pepper Dumplings Boil the tripe for six hours the day previous to using and save the liquor. Boil the knuckle of veal in a separate vessel in sufficient water to cover it; when the meat separates from the bones strain and add the liquor to the tripe liquor with the seasoning, potatoes and onion. Cut the tripe into pieces half an inch square, and the potatoes likewise. Boil all together for fifteen or twenty minutes, adding the dumplings ten minutes before serving time.
This is Philadelphia pepper pot in its plainest form, and the printed ingredient list is incomplete: tripe is the main solid and appears only in the method, with no quantity, and the dumplings are simply called for. Read the whole paragraph before shopping.
- Quantities to supply yourselfFigure on 1 to 1 1/2 lb honeycomb tripe and a veal knuckle of about 2 lb. The original assumes you know both, and gives no weight for either.
- Tripe today needs far less timeSix hours suits the unbleached, barely cleaned tripe of the period. Tripe now sold in the United States is generally cleaned and usually part-cooked before sale; 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer will often bring it to tender-with-bite. Test it rather than trusting the clock in either direction — undercooked tripe is rubbery and no amount of the final twenty-minute boil will fix it.
- The hinge: keep the two liquorsBoth the tripe water and the veal water are the soup. Skim them, but do not pour either away; the body of the dish comes from the veal knuckle's gelatin, not from any thickener.
- Knuckle of vealThe lower leg with its joint, sold as veal shank or osso buco cut. Ask a butcher; if unavailable, veal or beef shank pieces with plenty of bone do the same work.
- Where is the pepperThe name promises heat and this version buries it in "salt and pepper." Traditional pepper pot is aggressively peppered — a full teaspoon or more of coarse black pepper, added toward the end so it stays sharp.
- Sweet marjoram and the herb bunchThe recipe does not say whether the marjoram is dried; take the half tablespoon as dried, and if using fresh, roughly triple it. Tie the parsley and thyme together and pull the stems out before serving.
- DumplingsPlain flour dumplings, dropped on top for the last ten minutes. The recipe does not specify, but dumplings are best cooked covered and steamed above the liquid rather than submerged, or they can turn to paste.
- Yield and timingNo yield is given; the quantities suggest a main-course soup for several. Only the tripe is done the day before: the veal knuckle must still be boiled until the meat leaves the bone, so allow hours on serving day unless you do that ahead too. The final boil is fifteen to twenty minutes, with the dumplings in for the last ten.
Pepper pot is generally traced to the West Indies, where pepper pot is a long-simmered spiced stew, though the line of transmission into Philadelphia cookery is traditional rather than documented; by the nineteenth century the Philadelphia version — tripe, veal stock, potato, and a heavy hand with black pepper — had become a city institution, sold in the streets by vendors whose cry was remembered long after they were gone. The often-repeated story that an army cook invented it at Valley Forge from scraps is traditional rather than documented, and appears in print well after the fact. What the recipe does record accurately is the economics of the period kitchen: a knuckle bone and a length of tripe, both cheap offcuts, converted by two days of unhurried simmering into a soup substantial enough to be dinner. The terseness about the tripe is itself period evidence — the assumption being that any cook opening the book had bought and boiled it before.