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Stewed Tripe
Wash thoroughly one pound of tripe, boil it until tender and then drain it. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter into a stewpan with two tablespoonfuls of flour, and stir over the fire until well mixed; then pour in by degrees one pint of milk and keep on stirring until boiling. Put the tripe in the sauce, season to taste with pepper and salt and boil it gently for fifteen minutes or so. Turn the tripe and sauce onto a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread or sippets of toast, and serve.
A plain white sauce built around boiled tripe — the whole dish rests on how long you cook the tripe before the sauce ever appears.
- Buy the right tripeBeef tripe; honeycomb is the usual choice, though the recipe does not specify a cut. Nearly all tripe sold today is already scalded and cleaned, so the "wash thoroughly" step is a rinse; the long tenderizing boil is still required.
- "Boil it until tender" is the hingeExpect 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, depending on thickness, and judge by texture rather than a clock — it should yield easily to a knife but keep a slight chew. Undercooked tripe stays rubbery and no amount of time in the sauce will fix it. Salted water with an onion and a bay leaf improves both tripe and its smell.
- Cut it upThe original assumes you know to cut the drained tripe into strips or squares roughly an inch wide before it goes into the sauce.
- A pint of milkTwo cups in this American book. With two tablespoons each of butter and flour that gives a pouring sauce rather than a thick one, which is correct here; it thickens as the tripe sits in it.
- Cook the roux, don't color itStir the butter and flour a minute or two over moderate heat to lose the raw-flour taste, then add the milk gradually. This is a white sauce — no browning.
- Fifteen minutes, gentlyRead "boil it gently" as a low simmer, stirred now and then. A real boil in a flour-thickened sauce scorches on the bottom of the pan.
- SippetsTriangles or narrow fingers of toast, set around the edge of the dish. Croutons of fried bread are the same idea in butter or dripping.
- YieldOne pound feeds two as a supper dish, or four as a small course. The recipe asks only for pepper and salt; grated nutmeg and white pepper are a common addition to milk-based tripe dishes if you want them.
Tripe was standing food in nineteenth-century cities on both sides of the Atlantic — cheap, sold ready-scalded by tripe dealers, and eaten stewed in milk in the English manner or simmered for hours with cider and calf's foot as tripes à la mode de Caen. Its presence in a Waldorf-Astoria book is less odd than it looks: Oscar Tschirky's compilation runs from terrapin and canvasback down to far plainer dishes. Tripe stewed in white sauce with sippets of toast is the plainest version of the dish, an English nursery-and-chophouse formula rather than a French one, and the milk both tempers the flavor and gives the sauce its body.