Home › Meats › Tripe in Batter
Tripe in Batter
Cut fresh or pickled honeycomb tripe in pieces for serving. Cover with boiling water and allow it to simmer for a quarter of an hour. Drain, and cover with equal parts of milk and water. When just beginning to boil, drain, wipe thoroughly, season with salt and pepper, brush with melted butter, dip into batter and fry in deep fat. The recipe for batter is as follows:
Into one-third of a cup of milk in which an egg has been beaten, stir a cup of sifted flour and one and one-half teaspoon of baking powder. Season with salt and pepper.
A straightforward fry, but it assumes a butcher's tripe that has already been cleaned and part-cooked — the single assumption that will trip up a modern cook.
- The hinge: tripe must be tender before it meets the batterA quarter of an hour of simmering only works on tripe that has already been dressed and boiled, as much butcher's tripe of the period commonly was. Tripe bought raw or merely bleached needs one and a half to three hours at a bare simmer before it is chewable; test that a piece yields easily to a knife before going any further.
- Honeycomb tripeThe second stomach of the ox, with its distinctive pitted surface. It is the most tender of the tripes and still the easiest to find, usually frozen or vacuum-packed in Latin American, Italian and Chinese markets. Most of what is sold now is scalded and white; if you get the grey unbleached kind, it takes longer and smells stronger.
- Pickled tripeSold in brine and now uncommon outside a few regional butchers. If you use it, soak it in several changes of cold water for a few hours first, or the finished pieces will be aggressively salty once the batter concentrates the flavour.
- The milk-and-water blanchThe milk bath is usually read as a whitening and softening step for the flavour rather than a cooking one. Pull it off the heat the moment it trembles; boiled milk will scorch on the pan and cling to the tripe.
- Dry it properly"Wipe thoroughly" is doing real work. Tripe holds water in every pocket of the honeycomb, and wet tripe will shed its batter in the fryer and spit. Blot both sides, then let the pieces sit on a rack for ten minutes before battering.
- The batterOne-third cup milk, one egg, one cup flour and a teaspoon and a half of baking powder makes a very thick coating batter, closer to a paste than a pancake batter. Thin it with a tablespoon or two more milk if it will not flow off the spoon; use it promptly, as the baking powder starts working immediately.
- Deep fatThe recipe gives no temperature; around 375F is the usual modern figure, and fry in batches so it does not collapse. The tripe is already cooked at this stage, so you are only setting and browning the crust — three to four minutes is enough. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a pound of prepared tripe will stretch to a few modest servings. It wants something sharp alongside: lemon, vinegar, mustard or a tomato sauce.
Tripe was cheap protein, and cookbooks of the Butterick era treated it as unremarkable household meat rather than an oddity — it was commonly sold dressed and boiled, ready to be finished at home. That prior cooking is why so many old tripe recipes look impossibly quick. Frying in batter is one of the standard English and American finishes, alongside stewing in milk and broiling on a gridiron; the batter turns a soft, faintly gelatinous material into something with contrast, which is much of the point. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book as part of a broader line of domestic manuals aimed at the middle-class housekeeper, and a recipe like this one sits squarely in that mission: an economical cut, handled so that nobody at the table need think about what it is.