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Stewed Tripe with Tomato Sauce
One pound of tripe; one small onion; one pint of tomatoes; two tablespoons of flour; one-half tablespoon of butter; salt and pepper. Tripe as sold in the markets has been cleaned and partly cooked by steaming. Choose the honeycombed portions and the thick section. Wash the tripe carefully, cover with hot water, add the onion, cut in halves, cover the stewpan, and cook slowly for thirty-five minutes. The tripe will then be tender and soft, but long cooking will make it tough and hard. Place the tomatoes in a separate stewpan, cook them for ten minutes, strain through a flour sieve, and return to the pan. Wet the flour smooth in one-fourth cup of cold water, and when the strained tomatoes are boiling, add it, stirring all the time. This will thicken the liquid to a cream. Lastly, add salt and pepper to taste, and the butter. This sauce should be made while the tripe is cooking, and should be in readiness. When the tripe is cooked, drain well, place on a hot plate, and cut into slender strips. Then drain again, pressing the tripe gently between the back of a spoon and the plate to remove as much water as possible; and place it in the tomato sauce. Serve as soon as the sauce boils.
TRIPE À LA LYONNAISE-Cut two pounds of tripe into thin strips. Place in a frying-pan one ounce of butter, add a slice of onion and fry until colored. Then turn in the tripe, add a seasoning of salt and pepper and a very little nutmeg. Stir and cook gently until all moisture is absorbed; then add two cups of strained tomatoes. To prepare the tomato, cook it for fifteen minutes in a small pan, then pass it through a fine sieve to remove the seeds. After adding the tomato, cook for five minutes, then turn on a platter, add a sprinkling of chopped parsley and serve.
A plain two-pan dish: tripe simmered with onion, a smooth tomato sauce built alongside, the two brought together only at the last moment. The only real difficulty is that tripe on sale in 1911 was not quite the tripe on sale now.
- How long the tripe actually needsThe instruction to cook thirty-five minutes assumes market tripe already well steamed at the butcher's, and the warning that longer cooking toughens it is simply wrong for the product most cooks buy today. Honeycomb tripe from a modern supermarket is blanched and bleached but still raw in the middle, and wants 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer until it yields easily to a knife. Test it rather than trusting the clock; collagen-rich cuts get tender with time, not tough.
- Choosing the tripe"Honeycombed portions" is the reticulum, the second stomach chamber. "The thick section" most likely means one of the thicker seam or blanket cuts, though butchers' names for these vary. Honeycomb is the better texture for this dish and the easier to find; ask for it already cleaned and scalded.
- A pint of tomatoesTwo cups, and it may mean either fresh tomatoes stewed down or the contents of a can. A 14–15 oz can of whole tomatoes is close enough; the ten-minute cook and the sieving are there to break them down and remove seeds and skin, some of which a can of crushed tomatoes will already have handled.
- Flour sieveA fine-mesh strainer. Push the cooked tomato through with the back of a ladle and scrape the underside — what clings there is the good part.
- ThickeningOne-fourth cup of cold water to two tablespoons of flour makes a thin slurry; add it to boiling tomato in a stream, whisking, and let it boil a full minute or two afterward to cook out the raw starch. Butter goes in off the heat at the end so it stays emulsified.
- The drainingThe double drain and the pressing with a spoon are not fussiness. Wet tripe carries a surprising amount of simmering liquid, and it will thin the sauce to nothing if you skip it. Cut into strips while hot, then press.
- Nutmeg in the Lyonnaise"A very little" is accurate — a couple of scrapes on a grater for two pounds. Nutmeg with offal is a French convention and it goes wrong quickly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pound of tripe will serve roughly two as a main course, or three as part of a larger meal; the Lyonnaise version, at two pounds, about four.
Tripe is the stomach lining of cattle — honeycomb is the reticulum, the second chamber — and it belongs to the long tradition of offal cookery that a book like this took entirely for granted. The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns before it sold cookbooks, and its readers were households of moderate means for whom a pound of tripe was among the cheapest protein in the market; that it arrived already cleaned and steamed was one of the small conveniences of an urban butcher's shop that the recipe pauses to explain. The Lyonnaise variation nods to Lyon, a city whose reputation for tripe cookery is old and well established, and where dishes such as tablier de sapeur and gras-double à la lyonnaise remain on bouchon menus. In American practice "à la lyonnaise" came to signify little more than the presence of onion, which is fairly close to what is happening here.