Boiled Tripe
Wash the tripe well through several boiling waters; then put it in cold water, and let it soak over night. Scrape again until white and clean. Tripe is usually sold in the city markets already cleaned. Boil the tripe in equal parts of milk and water for one-half hour, boiling at the same time and in the same water a couple of onions, which should be put in the water at least onehalf hour before the tripe is put in to boil. Skim out the onions when perfectly tender, and make them into a sauce to pour over the tripe, as follows: Drain the cooked onions well and chop them very fine; then place them in one-half pint of hot milk, and season with butter, salt and pepper.
Tripe sold today is already dressed, so the overnight soaking and scraping belong to a era of butchering at home. The one thing worth changing is the cooking time.
- Half an hour is not enoughEven bleached, dressed honeycomb tripe needs 1½ to 3 hours of gentle simmering before it is tender enough to be pleasant; at thirty minutes it is still rubbery. Cook it until a knife slides through the honeycomb with no resistance, topping up the milk and water as it reduces.
- Skip the soak if the tripe is dressedAnything from a supermarket or a butcher's case has been cleaned, scalded and usually bleached. Rinse it, trim any grey edges, and go straight to the pot. The instructions for scraping until white apply to green tripe straight from the animal, which is rarely sold retail now.
- Milk and waterThe milk is there to keep the tripe pale and to soften the smell, not for richness. Use whole milk and hold the pot at a bare simmer; boiled milk scorches on the bottom of the pan and will catch during a long cook. A heavy pot and a low burner solve this.
- MeasurementsHalf a pint of milk is one cup. The recipe gives no weight of tripe; two pounds is a sensible batch and will serve four with potatoes.
- The onionsPut them in half an hour ahead as directed, but follow the recipe's instruction to skim them out when perfectly tender rather than leaving them for a much longer simmer. Whole peeled onions of medium size will be soft enough to chop to a pulp.
- The sauce is thinner than you expectChopped onion in hot milk with butter is barely bound. If you want it to coat the tripe, cook a tablespoon of butter with a tablespoon of flour, whisk in the cup of hot milk, then stir in the onions. A grating of nutmeg is often added to tripe cooked in milk.
- ServingCut the cooked tripe into strips or two-inch squares before saucing, and serve it hot on a warmed dish; it stiffens quickly as it cools.
Tripe, the muscular stomach lining of cattle, was one of the cheap offal cuts that nineteenth-century cook books commonly addressed, and boiling it in milk was one of the usual genteel treatments in English and American kitchens, the milk credited with whitening the meat and muting its smell. The aside that "tripe is usually sold in the city markets already cleaned" is the interesting line: it suggests that commercial dressing had taken over a job some households still did themselves, and that the book was addressing a reader who bought her meat rather than butchered it. Tripe with onions in milk survives most visibly as Lancashire tripe and onions in England, while the same offal took a spicier road in Philadelphia pepper pot, Norman tripes à la mode de Caen and Mexican menudo. Its retreat from American home cooking over the twentieth century is often attributed to the long simmering it demands as much as to taste.