Pepper Pot
Put three tablespoons of butter in frying-pan and sauté in it the following vegetables cut in small pieces: Three tablespoons each of onion, celery and green peppers and one and one-half cups potato. When they are nicely browned and have cooked for ten or fifteen minutes add three tablespoons flour and stir until well blended. Add five cups of white stock, also onehalf pound of honeycomb tripe cut in shreds, one-half teaspoon finely ground peppercorns and a scant teaspoon of salt. Cover closely and allow to simmer for an hour or more. When ready to serve, add one-half cup of cream and a tablespoon of butter.
A thickened tripe and vegetable soup of the Philadelphia type, built on a roux and finished with cream. The one thing to watch is the tripe: an hour of simmering only suffices if what you bought has already been long-cooked.
- Honeycomb tripeThis is the second stomach of a cow, sold in most supermarkets and Latin or Asian markets already bleached and blanched. Even so, most tripe needs 2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering to become tender rather than rubbery; taste it before you call the soup done and add stock as it reduces. If the package says pre-cooked, an hour may genuinely be enough.
- White stockIn period usage this meant a light unbrowned stock from veal knuckle or fowl. Use a good chicken or veal stock; avoid dark beef stock, which turns the soup muddy and defeats the pale, creamy finish.
- Green peppersBell peppers, not chiles. The heat here comes entirely from the peppercorns, so grind them fresh and expect the half teaspoon to be assertive against five cups of stock.
- Vegetable measuresThree tablespoons each of onion, celery and pepper is very little for five cups of liquid, roughly one small onion's worth in total. The potato at one and a half cups does most of the body-building work as it breaks down.
- The rouxThree tablespoons of flour into three tablespoons of butter with the vegetables gives only a lightly thickened soup, thinner than a gravy. Cook it a minute or two after adding the flour so it does not taste raw, then add the stock gradually to avoid lumps.
- Finishing with creamAdd the half cup of cream and final butter off the heat or over the lowest flame. Boiling after the cream goes in risks curdling and dulls the fresh dairy note that separates this from a plain tripe stew.
- YieldAbout five to six cups finished, serving four as a first course or three as a main with bread.
Pepper pot is Philadelphia's contribution to the American soup repertoire, and it is a tripe soup at heart: offal, aromatics, potato and a heavy hand with black pepper. The often-repeated story that a Continental Army cook improvised it at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 78 is patriotic tradition rather than documented fact; what is documented is that pepper pot was hawked in the streets of Philadelphia through the nineteenth century by Black women vendors, and that the name and technique echo the West Indian and West African pepper pots that reached the city through the Caribbean trade. The Butterick version has been tidied for a middle-class 1900s kitchen ery: a butter-and-flour base, a light veal or chicken stock instead of long-boiled beef, and a cream finish, which pulls it toward the cream soups then fashionable at the start of a formal dinner. That the book expects a reader to buy half a pound of honeycomb tripe without comment is a fair measure of how ordinary offal still was on the household shopping list.