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Fricassee of Tripe
Cut one pound or so of tripe into two-inch squares, place them in a saucpan with a small quantity each of mace and ground ginger, sweet herbs, and chopped onion, pour over sufficient white wine to cover, stand the saucepan on the fire and cook for fifteen minutes. Remove the herbs, add a little chopped parsley, half of an anchovy cut up small, the juice of a lemon, one breakfast cupful of cream, and a thickening of yolk of egg and butter. Season the mixture well, stir it over the fire for a few minutes, turn the whole out onto a dish, and serve with slices of lemon for garnish.
Tripe, Lyonnese Wash thoroughly one and one-half pounds of tripe, boil it until tender in water, cut it up into pieces about one and one-half inches long and one inch wide, sprinkle over them a seasoning of salt, pepper and flour, put them into fryingpan with boiling lard, and fry for five or six minutes. Remove them and drain on a sieve. Put two or three onions, cut up into slices in a fryingpan with a small quantity of oil, butter and a clove of garlic, and cook them until they are well colored; then add the tripe, sprinkle over a little cayenne, toss the pan over the fire until the onions are cooked, take out the garlic, add a small quantity of chopped parsley, take the pan off the fire, squeeze in the juice of two lemons, turn the whole out onto a dish, and serve. Tripe, Poulette Style Put a large chopped onion into a saucepan with a little butter and fry to a good yellow color; add one pound of tripe cut into squares, season well with salt and pepper and fry it until the moisture of the tripe is reduced, dredge over two tablespoonfuls of flour and add gradually sufficient rich broth to moisten. Stir well until the liquor boils, then add a bunch of parsley, boil for two or three minutes, remove the saucepan to the side of the fire and simmer gently for twenty-five minutes. Remove the pieces of tripe, place them on a dish and keep warm. Reduce the liquor, thicken it with yolks of eggs, pour it over the tripe and serve. A small quantity of butter, chopped parsley, lemon juice, grated nutmeg, etc., may be mixed with the liquor.
Three tripe preparations run together in one block of text. All three assume tripe that has already been cleaned and, in most cases, pre-cooked — an assumption modern packaging no longer makes for you.
- Start with the tripe itselfOnly the Lyonnese version tells you to boil the tripe until tender. The fricassee and the poulette both need the same treatment first: honeycomb beef tripe simmered in water until a knife slides through easily, usually 1½ to 3 hours depending on how thoroughly it was pre-blanched. Fifteen minutes in wine will not tenderise raw tripe.
- Sold cleaned, not cookedSupermarket tripe today is bleached and scrubbed but still firm. Rinse it well, simmer it in salted water with an onion and a bay leaf, then cool it before cutting into squares.
- The egg-yolk liaisonIn both the fricassee and the poulette, the yolks must not boil or the sauce curdles into scrambled egg. Temper them with a ladle of the hot liquid first, return the pan to low heat, and stir until it coats a spoon — no bubbles.
- A breakfast cupfulRoughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; treat it as one cup of cream. "A thickening of yolk of egg and butter" is unquantified — two yolks and a tablespoon of butter suit a pound of tripe.
- Mace and gingerGround mace, the outer covering (aril) of nutmeg, has a related but more delicate flavour; a quarter teaspoon with the same of ground ginger is enough for a pound. Mace was a common seasoning in white sauces of the period, and the spicing gives this an older character than the other two versions.
- The anchovyHalf an anchovy fillet, mashed, dissolves into the cream and reads as depth rather than fish. Anchovy paste, about half a teaspoon, does the same job.
- Boiling lardLard, beef tallow or a neutral oil; the book gives no temperature, but something in the region of 350 to 375F. The tripe is already cooked here, so the frying is only for colour and crust -- five or six minutes is right, and longer makes it leathery.
- YieldNo yield is given. Each version would probably serve two to three as a main course, or four as a first course. Tripe is filling out of proportion to its weight.
Tripe was cheap offal that respectable restaurants nonetheless kept on the menu, and the Waldorf -- whose maître d'hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, lent his name to this 1896 book -- served it in the French idioms his diners recognised: à la poulette, meaning finished with a velouté and egg-yolk liaison, and lyonnaise, which in French cooking simply signals onions cooked in fat. The fricassee, with its mace, ginger, anchovy and cream, belongs to an older English tradition -- that combination of sweet spice and salt fish in a white sauce can be traced back through eighteenth-century English cookery, and looks old-fashioned beside the other two. Serving all three side by side suggests a book recording what a large hotel kitchen might be asked to produce, whether or not any single dish was in vogue. Tripe from the ox's stomach also came into the kitchen requiring hours of preliminary boiling, work a hotel brigade could absorb more easily than a home cook, which may be part of why dishes like these thinned out of American cookbooks over the following century.