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Baked Tripe with Potatoes
Cut one pound of tripe into one-inch squares, put them into an earthenware basin with four chopped onions, and one teaspoonful each of pepper and salt, cover with stock or water, place the basin in a slow oven and bake for three hours. Strain off the liquor into a saucepan, skim it, add sufficient flour to thicken and boil it up once. Arrange the tripe and onions in a pie-dish, pour over the liquor and cover the top with mashed potatoes, stand the dish in a hot oven and bake for ten minutes, so as to heat the mass thoroughly and brown the surface. Remove it and serve the dish without delay.
A two-stage dish: a long, low braise to soften the tripe, then a brief blast under a hot oven to brown a potato crust. Almost everything that can go wrong happens in the first stage.
- Buy the right tripeNearly all tripe sold now is "dressed" or bleached honeycomb tripe, already scalded and partly cooked at the packer; green (undressed) tripe is generally sold only as pet food. Older cookery of this kind also relied on tripe bought ready-dressed from a tripe dresser, so if you find truly raw tripe it needs long simmering before it ever reaches the oven.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven for the three-hour bake is around 300F. For the final browning use a hot oven, roughly 425-450F, or the broiler for three or four minutes, which browns the potato faster than the ten minutes given.
- Cover the basinThe recipe does not say to cover, but three hours uncovered at 300F will reduce the stock away and dry the top layer of tripe. Use a lid or foil, and check that the meat stays submerged.
- Three hours is not fixedPre-cooked honeycomb tripe may be tender in 90 minutes to two hours. Test with a knife tip: it should yield like soft-cooked cabbage, with a slight resilience. Undercooked tripe is rubbery and no amount of browning fixes it.
- VesselsAn earthenware basin is a deep ovenproof bowl; a small Dutch oven or a covered casserole does the same job. The "pie-dish" for assembly is a shallow baking dish, often oval, not a pastry case, and there is no pastry anywhere in this recipe.
- Thickening"Sufficient flour" means roughly one tablespoon per cup of strained liquor. Slurry it with cold water or work it into softened butter first, or you will be picking out lumps. Skim the fat properly before thickening; tripe braising liquor throws a fair amount.
- The potatoesNo quantity is given. About 1.5 to 2 lb of potatoes, mashed fairly stiff with butter and a little of the hot liquor, will cover a dish holding a pound of tripe. Loose mash slumps into the gravy and never crusts.
- Seasoning and onionsFour onions to a pound of tripe is a lot, but the sweetness carries a bland meat. A teaspoon each of salt and pepper is heavy by modern taste, the pepper especially; taste the thickened liquor before it goes over the tripe.
- YieldServes three, or four as part of a larger meal. Serve immediately, as the recipe insists: the crust softens within minutes.
Tripe cookery in an American hotel book of this period sits oddly beside the terrapin and canvasback. Tripe was cheap offal with a long British and Northern French pedigree: baked or stewed with onions in Lancashire and Normandy alike, and sold from tripe shops in industrial cities well into the twentieth century. The potato-crusted assembly here is essentially a cottage pie method applied to a braise, a common Victorian way of turning yesterday's slow-cooked meat into something that arrives at table hot and browned. Tripe fell out of American favour after mid-century as offal generally did, though it survives vigorously in menudo, trippa alla romana and pho, and honeycomb tripe remains easy to buy where those cuisines are cooked.