Baked Tripe
Cut honeycomb tripe into pieces about the size of a griddlecake. Spread each piece with a little bread and onion stuffing. Roll each and secure with a couple of wooden toothpicks. Dredge with flour and brush over with melted butter. Place in a dripping-pan and bake for a half hour, basting frequently with hot water in which has been melted a tablespoon of butter and which has been seasoned with salt, pepper and a little paprika. Squeeze a little lemon juice over the tripe just before serving.
A period way of turning a cheap cut into something like little stuffed roulades. The recipe assumes a cook who already has tripe simmering on the stove and a bowl of poultry stuffing at hand, so most of the work is in what it does not say.
- The hinge: the tripe must already be tenderHalf an hour in the oven will not cook tripe. Tripe of this period was often sold part-cooked, and long simmering was in any case usual; the baking here can only be for browning and flavour. Simmer honeycomb tripe in salted water until a knife goes through it with no resistance — commonly two to three hours — then cool it before cutting and rolling.
- What you can buy nowSupermarket and butcher tripe is usually sold "dressed" — scalded, scraped and often bleached — but that is a cleaning step, not necessarily a cooking one. US tripe generally still needs the long simmer; UK dressed tripe is sometimes sold already boiled, so check before you start. Honeycomb is the usual choice here; flat blanket tripe is often reckoned less tender in a dish like this.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only "bake". A moderate oven, somewhere around 350°F to 375°F, uncovered, is a reasonable modern reading, so the floured surface takes colour.
- Griddlecake sizeRoughly a four-inch round or square, which is about right for a single roll. Cut the tripe after it is cooked and cooled — hot tripe is slippery and will not hold a neat shape.
- Bread and onion stuffingThe book expects you to know it: stale breadcrumbs, chopped onion softened in butter, salt, pepper, sage or thyme, bound with a little egg or stock. Keep it fairly dry, since the rolls are basted from the outside.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting pan or rimmed sheet, the sort that once caught fat from a roast above. A tight-sided baking dish will steam the rolls instead of browning them.
- The basting liquidHot water with a tablespoon of melted butter, salt, pepper and paprika — thin by modern habits. Well-seasoned stock does the same job with more return, and what collects in the pan can be reduced into a spoonful of sauce.
- ToothpicksWooden picks soaked briefly in water are less likely to scorch. Count them going in and count them coming out before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A pound of cooked tripe will make roughly half a dozen to eight rolls, enough for two or three as a main course with potatoes.
Tripe — the stomach lining of a cow, honeycomb being the second chamber — was one of the cheapest animal foods available to a nineteenth-century household, and cookbooks of the period treat it as a staple rather than a curiosity. The *Butterick Cook Book* (1911) came from the pattern company, aimed squarely at the middle-class woman running her own kitchen on a budget. Stuffing and rolling a flat piece of meat is a technique that closely resembles beef olives and paupiettes, and applying it to tripe is a genteel move: it gives an unfashionable ingredient the shape and presentation of something grander. The finishing squeeze of lemon is the traditional foil for tripe's richness, the same instinct behind the vinegar served with tripe and onions in the north of England.