Tripe
Soak the tripe for several hours; scrape clean; put in salted water and simmer for three or four hours. Drain off the water and set the tripe aside until ready to use. To one cup of cream sauce add a half teaspoon of onion juice and a cup of the boiled tripe. Stir until the tripe is heated and serve.
A plain creamed-tripe luncheon dish of the sort that filled the "meats" chapter of every economy-minded cookbook. The recipe assumes you know what cream sauce is and that your tripe arrived raw.
- What tripe you can buy nowMost tripe sold in the United States today, honeycomb beef tripe especially, has already been cleaned and scalded (often bleached), so the long soak and scrape the recipe calls for is largely done. Unbleached or "green" tripe from a butcher does still need the soaking and scraping described.
- Simmering timeThree to four hours is right for raw tripe. Pre-cleaned supermarket tripe is usually tender in 1.5 to 2.5 hours; test it rather than clock it, since thickness varies. It should yield to a knife but keep some spring — boiled to collapse it turns pasty.
- Salted waterSeason the cooking water lightly, about a teaspoon of salt per quart. Some cooks add a bay leaf, a halved onion and a splash of vinegar, which cuts the barnyard note the period books politely ignore.
- Cream saucePeriod cookbooks generally mean a medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and white pepper.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a cloth. Half a teaspoon of the liquid gives the flavor without visible onion, which was the point.
- CuttingThe recipe never says to cut the tripe. Slice the cooled boiled tripe into half-inch strips or squares before measuring the cup, or it will not heat evenly in the sauce.
- FinishingWarm the tripe through in the sauce over low heat only, a couple of minutes. Hard boiling at this stage does the texture no favours and can break the sauce.
- Yield and servingOne cup of tripe in one cup of sauce serves two as a light main course. The recipe says only "serve"; creamed dishes of this kind were commonly put on toast or held in a chafing dish.
Tripe — the muscular stomach lining of cattle — was one of the cheapest proteins on an American butcher's counter in the early twentieth century, and cookbooks of this era treat it as a matter of course rather than a curiosity. The two-stage handling here, a long plain boil followed by a quick reheating in sauce, reflects how much work tripe needed before it was fit for anything. Creaming a cooked meat in white sauce and serving it on toast was the standard format for luncheon and supper dishes in this period, applied equally to chicken, dried beef, sweetbreads and eggs; tripe simply took its turn. The onion juice is often said to be a domestic-science touch of the same years, when strained juice was reportedly preferred to chopped onion in pale sauces meant to look refined.