Broiled Tripe
Cut honeycomb tripe into long pieces, and add a seasoning of salt and pepper; place in an oyster broiler and broil until of a nice brown. Lay on a serving platter and pour over it melted butter seasoned with the juice of a lemon and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.
A four-line recipe that assumes something no longer true: that the tripe you bought had already been boiled tender. Get that part right and the rest is a five-minute job.
- The hinge: tripe must be tender before it is broiledAround 1900 tripe was usually sold already scalded and part-boiled by the tripe dresser, so a recipe could assume it needed little further cooking. Modern "cleaned" or "bleached" honeycomb tripe is generally raw. Simmer it in salted water, often with a bay leaf and a splash of vinegar, for 1½ to 3 hours until a knife slips through easily, then cool and dry it before broiling. Broiling raw tripe produces something close to rubber.
- An oyster broilerA hinged double wire grill with a long handle, made to hold small slippery things over coals so they could be turned in one motion. A folding fish basket does the same job on a grill; under a domestic broiler, a rack set over a sheet pan is fine.
- Heat and timeHigh heat, close to the element or coals. Two to four minutes a side is enough to brown and blister the honeycomb surface; the meat is already cooked, so longer only dries it out.
- Dry it wellBoiled tripe holds a lot of water and will steam rather than brown. Pat the pieces thoroughly dry and, if you like, brush them lightly with butter or oil before seasoning.
- Cut"Long pieces" is not defined. Strips roughly 2 inches wide and 4 to 5 inches long work well — big enough not to fall through the wires, small enough to turn.
- The sauceFor 1½ lb of cooked tripe, 4 tablespoons butter melted with lemon juice (the recipe specifies a whole lemon; half may suit this quantity) and 2 tablespoons chopped parsley is about right. Pour it over at the table; it sets and dulls if it sits.
- Yield1½ to 2 lb of prepared tripe serves four as a main course with potatoes, or six as part of a larger meal.
Honeycomb tripe — the second stomach of the ox, named for the deep cellular pattern of its lining — was cheap urban meat throughout the nineteenth century, sold by tripe dressers who did the long, malodorous work of scalding and boiling so that the household cook did not have to. That division of labour may be part of why so many period recipes for tripe are as brief as this one: much of the difficult part had already happened before the meat reached the kitchen. Broiling with lemon butter and parsley is often described as an English public-house treatment, a plainer cousin to the French preparations à la lyonnaise or à la mode de Caen. The Butterick Cook Book came from the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, and it was aimed at a middle-class housekeeper who was expected to buy well and cook economically — a book that finds room for tripe at all reflects a period when using the whole animal was ordinary rather than adventurous.