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Philadelphia Pepper Pot
Sliced onion Chopped celery 1/4 cup each Chopped green peppers 4 tablespoons butter 3½ tablespoons flour 5 cups hot White Stock III ½ lb. honeycomb tripe, cut in cubes 1½ cups potato cubes ½ teaspoon peppercorns, finely pounded ¾ tablespoon salt ½ cup heavy cream Cook vegetables in three tablespoons butter fifteen minutes; add flour, and stir until well mixed; then add remaining ingredients except cream. Cover, and let cook one hour. Just before serving, add cream and remaining butter.
A cream-finished version of Philadelphia's tripe soup, built on a light veal stock. The work is all in the tripe: everything else is a straightforward vegetable soup base.
- Buy the tripe cookedHoneycomb tripe sold today is usually already blanched and partly cooked, but it is rarely tender. Simmer it separately in salted water until it yields easily to a knife — often 1½ to 2 hours — before it goes into the soup, since the hour given here assumes tripe that has already had a long preliminary boil.
- White Stock IIIIn this book that is a light, unbrowned veal stock (the white stocks are veal-based, sometimes with fowl). A low-sodium chicken stock, or veal stock if you have it, stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, as the soup should stay pale.
- Quantities that read oddlyThe flour should be read as 3½ tablespoons — enough to thicken five cups of stock lightly — and the salt as about ¾ tablespoon, to be adjusted after the stock has reduced. Salt at the end rather than the start.
- PeppercornsThe pepper is the point of the dish. Pound whole black peppercorns finely, as the recipe directs, rather than using pre-ground pepper; the 1½ teaspoons called for in five cups of soup is assertive but correct for a pepper pot.
- The vegetablesA quarter cup each of sliced onion, chopped celery and chopped green pepper. Fifteen minutes in butter over low heat should soften them without colour — this is a white soup.
- Adding the creamOff the heat or at a bare simmer. Half a cup of heavy cream added to a boiling flour-thickened soup will not break, but boiling after the cream goes in dulls the pepper and thickens the soup past where it should be.
- YieldFive cups of stock plus tripe, potato and cream gives roughly six first-course servings, or four as a main with bread.
Philadelphia pepper pot is one of the few regional American soups with a durable civic legend attached to it: it is traditionally said to have been improvised by an army cook at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777, though the story is folklore rather than documented history and the dish's ancestry is often traced to West Indian and West African peppery tripe and offal stews carried into Philadelphia's markets. By the nineteenth century pepper pot was street food there, sold from stands by Black vendors whose cries were a fixture of the city. This version, with its butter-and-flour base, veal stock and finishing cream, is that street soup put into a cooking-school frame — refined, measured, and considerably milder than the original, but still recognisable in its cubes of honeycomb tripe and heavy hand with pounded pepper.