Lyonnaise Tripe
Cut honeycomb tripe in pieces two inches long by one-half inch wide, having three cupfuls. Put in a pan and place in oven that water may be drawn out. Cook one tablespoon finely chopped onion in two tablespoons butter until slightly browned, add tripe drained from water, and cook five minutes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and finely chopped parsley.
A quick sauté that assumes something the text never says: the tripe is already cooked. Fannie Farmer's readers bought tripe from the butcher already boiled tender, and the book's other tripe entries treat that as a given.
- Start with tender tripeHoneycomb tripe sold today is scalded and bleached but rarely cooked through. Simmer it in salted water until a knife goes in with no resistance — usually 1½ to 3 hours — then cool and cut. Skipping this leaves it rubbery no matter how long it sits in the pan.
- The oven stepSetting the cut tripe in a pan in the oven for a short time drives off the water it holds, so it browns in the butter instead of steaming; the recipe specifies neither temperature nor time. Drain and blot it before it goes into the pan; this is the hinge of the dish.
- QuantityThree cupfuls of cut tripe is roughly one pound, trimmed. That serves two as a main course or three or four as a first course.
- Five minutes means high heatThe tripe is already cooked, so the second cooking is purely for colour and flavour. Use a wide pan, keep the heat brisk, and leave the pieces alone long enough to take on some brown edges.
- Lyonnaise proportionsOne tablespoon of onion to a pound of tripe is restrained by present taste. A small onion, sliced thin and cooked slowly to a deep gold before the tripe joins it, gives more of the onion character now associated with the name lyonnaise.
- FinishingA splash of wine vinegar or lemon off the heat, added with the parsley, is the standard French finish and cuts the richness of the butter. The book leaves it out, but the dish takes it well.
"Lyonnaise" on an American menu of the 1890s generally suggested cooking in butter with onion, after the style of Lyon, a city whose bouchons built their reputation on offal he like — tripe, andouillette, and the like. Tripe was cheap and filling, which is why it earns several entries in a book written for a cooking school teaching household economy. Farmer's version is a frugal dish dressed in a French name, a common move in period American cookery, where a familiar cut gained standing from the label attached to it. The drying-out step in the oven is the mark of a careful teacher: wet tripe will not brown, and the whole point of the preparation is the contrast between crisp edges and soft interior.