Tripe in Batter
Wipe tripe and cut in pieces for serving. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in batter, fry in a small quantity of hot fat, and drain.
Tripe Batter. Mix one cup flour with one-fourth teaspoon salt; add gradually one-half cup cold water, and when perfectly smooth add one egg well beaten, one-half tablespoon vinegar, and one teaspoon olive oil or melted butter.
A simple fritter treatment for tripe, with the caveat that Fannie Farmer assumed her reader was starting from tripe that had already been boiled tender. Nothing here cooks it through.
- The hinge: cook the tripe firstThe batter frying takes minutes and does nothing to soften collagen. Tripe sold today, even labeled "cleaned" or "scalded," needs to simmer in salted water until a knife goes through with no resistance -- generally 1½ to 2 hours for honeycomb, longer for thicker cuts -- then be cooled and dried before it meets the batter.
- What kind of tripeHoneycomb (the second stomach) is the standard choice and holds batter well. Blanket or plain tripe is thicker and takes longer to tenderize. In 1896 tripe was often sold pickled in vinegar brine; if you find that kind, soak and rinse it or the dish turns sour.
- "Wipe tripe"This means blot it thoroughly dry. Wet tripe will spit in the fat and shed its coating; press between towels and let it sit uncovered a few minutes.
- Pieces for servingRoughly 2 by 3 inch rectangles. Larger pieces curl badly as the fat hits them.
- The batterOne cup flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup cold water, one beaten egg, 1/2 tablespoon vinegar, one teaspoon oil or melted butter gives a thin-ish coating batter that clings rather than a pourable one. The acid will slightly slacken gluten development and reduces browning, so the coating stays paler; whether Farmer intended that or simply liked the tang is not stated. A rest of 15 minutes does no harm.
- "A small quantity of hot fat"Shallow frying rather than deep frying; a quarter-inch or so of fat is enough. The recipe gives no temperature; as modern guidance, somewhere around 350-375F works, since cooler fat is absorbed by the batter and much hotter fat colours the coating before it sets on the slick surface of the tripe.
- YieldThe batter coats roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of cooked tripe, serving about four. Serve immediately, with lemon, vinegar or a tomato sauce.
Tripe was cheap, filling and, in the late nineteenth century, still a normal thing for an American household to buy: Farmer gives it several recipes in the beef chapter, which suggests it was routine rather than adventurous. Much of it reached the kitchen already "dressed" -- scraped, scalded and often part-boiled before it was sold, sometimes held in vinegar brine, which is why so many old recipes begin with a brisk "wipe tripe" and proceed straight to the pan. The batter here, with its egg, its spoonful of vinegar and its teaspoon of oil, is close in kind to the frying batters the book uses elsewhere. Tripe's slow retreat from the American table is usually attributed to rising incomes and the decline of whole-carcass butchery rather than to any change in the meat.