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Tripe Fried in Batter
Cut pickled honeycomb tripe in pieces for serving; wash, cover with boiling water, and simmer gently twenty minutes. Drain, and again cover, using equal parts cold water and milk. Heat to boiling-point, again drain, wipe as dry as possible, sprinkle with salt and pepper, brush over with melted butter, dip in batter, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Serve with slices of lemon and Chili Sauce. Batter. Mix and sift one cup flour, one and one-half teaspoons baking powder, one-fourth teaspoon salt, and a few grains pepper. Add one-third cup milk and one egg well beaten.
The instructions assume a product that has largely left the market: tripe sold already pickled and mostly cooked. Almost everything that needs adjusting follows from that.
- Pickled tripe is the missing ingredientNineteenth-century grocers sold honeycomb tripe in vinegar brine, already scalded and tender, so twenty minutes' simmering was only a freshening step. Tripe sold today is bleached and cleaned but essentially raw, and needs 1.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer until a knife goes through the honeycomb with no resistance.
- Why the milk bathThe second liquid, half cold water and half milk, was most likely meant to draw off residual vinegar and lingering odor, though the recipe does not say. It is worth keeping even with modern tripe; bring it barely to a boil and drain.
- Dry it thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Tripe holds water in every cell of the honeycomb, and wet tripe will shed its batter in the fat and spit badly. Press between towels and let it air-dry a few minutes before salting.
- Batter consistencyOne cup flour to one-third cup milk and one egg gives a very stiff coating batter by modern standards, closer to a paste. Thin it with milk a spoonful at a time until it just falls from the spoon in a ribbon.
- Deep fatFry in lard or a similar fat, roughly 375F. This recipe gives no test for the fat; the book's general frying directions elsewhere judge it by how fast a bread cube browns. If the tripe is the pickled, already-tender kind, fry only until the crust is deep gold, two to three minutes.
- Brown paperGrocery bag paper was the standard drain. Use a wire rack over a sheet pan; paper towels underneath a rack are fine, but draining directly on them steams the underside soft.
- Chili SauceThe cross-reference is to the book's own Chili Sauce, a cooked tomato, onion, pepper and vinegar relish in the ketchup family. It is not a hot sauce, and a mild tomato chutney is the nearest substitute.
- YieldThe recipe states no quantity of tripe or number of servings; this much batter would coat roughly 1.5 to 2 lb, enough for about four.
Tripe was one of the cheapest things a New England market sold, and Boston in particular had a long appetite for it: pickled tripe came out of barrels of vinegar brine, sold by the pound, and needed only freshening and frying at home. That convenience explains the brevity of the original cooking time here. Frying tripe in a batter was the dressier treatment; the plainer alternative was broiling it with butter. The dish belongs to a moment when a cooking school could assume every student knew what honeycomb tripe looked like, which is now the part of the recipe that most needs explaining.