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Tripe à la Creole
Cut, bake, and drain tripe as for Lyonnaise Tripe. Cook same quantity of butter and onion, add one-eighth green pepper finely chopped, one tablespoon flour, one-half cup stock, one-fourth cup drained tomatoes, and one fresh mushroom cut in slices; then add tripe and cook five minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
Tripe à la Provençale Add to Lyonnaise Tripe one tablespoon white wine.
Cook until quite dry, add one-third cup Tomato Sauce, cook two minutes, season with salt and pepper, and serve.
Two short variations that lean entirely on the preceding Lyonnaise Tripe recipe for quantities and method. The finishing steps take minutes; all the real work is in getting the tripe tender first.
- The hinge: tripe must already be tenderThe five minutes here is a finishing simmer in sauce, nothing more. Tripe that has not been cooked to full tenderness beforehand will be rubbery no matter how long it sits in the tomato. Honeycomb tripe from a butcher, even the bleached and "partly cooked" kind, generally wants 1½ to 3 hours of gentle simmering until it yields easily to a knife point.
- "Cut, bake, and drain as for Lyonnaise"The parent recipe governs the size of the pieces and the initial cooking; none of it is repeated on this page, so look it up before starting. Drain and blot the tripe dry — wet tripe will steam rather than take on colour in the butter.
- "Same quantity of butter and onion"Carried over from Lyonnaise Tripe, so take the amounts from that recipe; the onion finely chopped and softened in the butter before anything else goes in. Scale up with the tripe if you are cooking more than one or two portions.
- One-eighth green pepper, one fresh mushroomAn eighth of a pepper comes to roughly a tablespoon of fine dice, depending on the size of the pepper. Two or three ordinary button mushrooms are a fair substitute for "one fresh mushroom".
- Flour and stockThe tablespoon of flour is cooked into the butter and onion to make a small roux; the half cup of stock goes in gradually. Beef or veal stock suits the dish. It should end up a coating sauce, not a soup.
- "Drained tomatoes"Most likely canned tomatoes, tipped into a sieve and the juice let go, so the sauce is not thinned. A quarter cup of drained tomato, roughly chopped, is what is wanted.
- Tomato Sauce in the Provençale versionThis refers to the book's own recipe — a butter-and-flour roux with stewed tomato, seasoned and strained. Any smooth, unsweetened tomato sauce works. "Cook until quite dry" means drive off the wine before the sauce goes in.
- YieldAs written this is one or two servings, in the manner of a lunch or supper entrée rather than a main course. Multiply straightforwardly.
"À la Creole" in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks was less a claim of New Orleans authorship than a shorthand for a particular trio — onion, green pepper and tomato. Tripe itself needed no explanation to her readers: the stomach lining of beef was cheap, widely sold, and a fixture of New England cooking, where it turned up broiled with mustard, pickled in vinegar, or fried in batter. What these two entries show is the method of the book in miniature — a base preparation (Lyonnaise Tripe) followed by variations that change only the last two minutes, teaching the reader that a sauce vocabulary can be applied to any cooked meat.