Tripe Stew
3 Pounds Boiled Tripe 2 Tablespoons Lard 1 Tablespoon Butter 1 Cup Greens 6 Large Potatoes 3 Onions 3 Cloves 3 Garlic Cloves 1 Quart Tomatoes Few Dried Mushrooms Melt lard and butter in a stew kettle; add the onions, cloves, garlic, greens and parsley, all chopped fine. Strain tomatoes and add with the mushrooms.
Add the boiled tripe, cut in thin strips.
Add boiling water if too dry. Serve hot.
A plain one-pot stew that assumes two things the text never says: that your tripe is already fully cooked, and that you will cook the potatoes it lists. Read it as a finishing stew rather than a from-scratch braise.
- Start with cooked tripe"Boiled tripe" is the hinge. Supermarket honeycomb tripe is cleaned and bleached but raw, and needs 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, with a change of water, before it is tender enough to slice into strips. Adding it raw to this pot will give you rubber bands in tomato sauce.
- The potatoesThey appear in the list and never in the method. Peel and cut them into chunks, add them with the strained tomatoes, and simmer covered 25-30 minutes until tender; the tripe strips go in for the last 10 minutes or so, since they only need heating through.
- ParsleyAlso called for in the method but missing from the list. A small handful, chopped, is right — half in with the aromatics, half over the finished dish.
- A quart of tomatoesThat is one 28-oz can plus a little, roughly 4 cups. "Strain" means press out the seeds and skins of home-canned whole tomatoes; with modern canned tomatoes, crushed or passata does the job directly.
- Dried mushroomsSoak them in hot water 20 minutes first, chop, and add the strained soaking liquid to the pot — that liquid is most of what the mushrooms are there for. About ½ oz of dried porcini or a mixed bag.
- Cloves and garlicThree whole cloves chopped fine is assertive in a pot this size; if you would rather not bite into one, add them whole and fish them out. Three garlic cloves is modest for this volume.
- GreensA cup of anything sturdy — escarole, chard, kale, cabbage. Chopped fine, as directed, it melts into the sauce rather than reading as a vegetable.
- YieldThree pounds of tripe with six potatoes feeds six to eight generously. Salt is not mentioned and the dish needs a firm hand with it, plus pepper and a splash of vinegar or lemon at the end to lift the tomato.
Tripe was cheap protein in many European and American cooking traditions that butchered their own cattle, and the offal chapters of household manuals were not exotic, they were economy. This particular treatment, with lard, garlic, cloves, tomatoes and dried mushrooms, sits closer to Italian trippa alla romana or a Proven theu00e7al tripe stew than to the milk-and-onion English style, which suggests the immigrant kitchens that were reshaping American home cooking around the turn of the century. The assumption that tripe arrives already boiled is telling: tripe was often sold dressed or part-boiled, so the housewife's job began at the stew kettle rather than at the long scalding and scraping that earlier generations had to do themselves.