Broiled Tripe
Fresh honeycomb tripe is best for broiling. Wipe tripe as dry as possible, dip in fine cracker dust and olive oil or melted butter, draining off all fat that is possible, and again dip in cracker dust. Place in a greased broiler and broil five minutes, cooking smooth side of tripe the first three minutes. Place on a hot platter, honeycomb side up, spread with butter, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Broiled tripe is at its best when cooked over a charcoal fire.
A short recipe that assumes something no longer true: that tripe comes out of the shop already boiled tender. Everything depends on that.
- Start with cooked tripeTripe of this period generally reached the cook already cleaned and boiled by the butcher (pickled tripe was sold separately), and the five-minute broil is only browning and heating. Tripe bought raw today needs simmering for 1.5 to 3 hours, until a knife goes through easily, before it goes anywhere near the broiler.
- Honeycomb tripeThe second stomach of the ox, with its distinctive cell pattern. Look for it at Latin American, Chinese or Eastern European butchers; supermarket tripe, when it appears, is usually honeycomb and already blanched pale white.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled plain soda or water crackers, close to today's unseasoned cracker meal. Panko is coarser and browns differently; crushed saltines are the nearest thing on a supermarket shelf, and need no added salt in the coating.
- "Draining off all fat that is possible"The point is a dry, thin crumb coat. Too much butter or oil clinging to the crumbs will smoke and slide off under direct heat rather than crisping.
- The broilerA "greased broiler" is a hinged wire broiling iron used over coals. Under a modern gas or electric broiler, use the top rack with the element fully preheated, or a ridged grill pan over high heat.
- Smooth side firstThree minutes on the smooth side, two on the honeycomb. The recipe then has the tripe served honeycomb side up, buttered and seasoned.
- CharcoalThe closing note is not sentiment. Tripe is bland and gelatinous; smoke and hard char are most of its flavour. A charcoal grill or a very hot cast-iron pan does more for it than an oven broiler.
- YieldAllow about 6 oz of cooked tripe per person as a main course, 3 oz as a first course. Lemon, mustard or a vinegar-based sauce is a conventional accompaniment.
Tripe held a steady place in nineteenth-century American cookery because it was cheap, filling and sold ready-boiled by butchers who had the vats and the time for it; the cook's job was only to finish it. Broiled, fried in batter, or stewed with milk and onion, it appears in cookbooks of the period as a plain family dish rather than an oddity, and the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats it that way, filing it among the beef cuts with no apology. New England had its own long attachment to the dish, and Philadelphia its pepper pot; the general retreat of offal from American home cooking came later, with refrigeration, packaged cuts and a shift in what shoppers were willing to look at in a case. The instruction to cook it over charcoal points back to the open grate and the hinged broiling iron, still in living memory when this book was written but already being displaced by the closed range.