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Tripe and Onions
Put one pound of tripe into a saucepan with four large onions cut into slices, sprinkle over one teaspoonful of salt and a small quantity of pepper, and pour over one pint of water, place the saucepan on the fire and boil for about twenty-five minutes, or until the tripe is tender. Take out the tripe and onions, skim the fat off the liquor, reduce it to half its original quantity, add a thickening of milk and flour, and boil for a minute or two; replace the tripe and onions, simmer at the side of the fire for fifteen minutes, turn the whole out onto a dish and serve hot.
The recipe assumes tripe that has already spent hours in the butcher's copper. Everything else here is straightforward; the timing is not.
- The twenty-five minutes is the catchTripe in this period was generally sold dressed, already scalded, bleached and boiled soft by the butcher, so it needed little more than reheating to tenderness. Tripe sold today, even when labelled cleaned and bleached, is often raw enough to want an hour or two of gentle simmering, sometimes longer, before it will yield. Cook it tender first, in plain salted water, then begin at the point where this recipe starts.
- Which tripeHoneycomb (the second stomach) is the usual choice and the most forgiving; blanket or plain tripe is thicker and takes longer. Cut it into two-inch squares or strips before the final simmer so it eats cleanly with a spoon.
- A pint of waterIn an American book of this period, 16 fluid ounces, or two cups. It will barely cover a pound of tripe and four sliced onions, which is the intention: the onions release a good deal of liquid as they collapse.
- "A thickening of milk and flour"An unmeasured white wash: whisk about 2 tablespoons of flour into 1 cup of cold milk until smooth, then stir it into the reduced liquor off the boil. Bring it back briefly so the flour cooks out, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Reducing the liquorSkim the fat properly before reducing, or the sauce will break greasy under the milk. Half a pint of concentrated onion liquor plus a cup of milk gives roughly the right volume to coat the tripe rather than swim it.
- "At the side of the fire"The cool edge of a coal range, where a pot ticks over below a simmer. On a modern hob, the lowest setting with the lid ajar. A flour-thickened milk sauce catches on the bottom quickly at anything more vigorous, so stir every few minutes.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon of salt for a pound of tripe is modest once the sauce is reduced; taste at the end. White pepper suits the pale sauce, and a scrape of nutmeg or a spoon of mustard is often served with tripe and onions and lifts an otherwise very quiet dish.
- Yield and servingTwo as a main course, three or four as a supper dish. It wants something to absorb the sauce: mashed potato, boiled potatoes, or plain toast.
Tripe and onions in a milk sauce is an English dish, associated above all with Lancashire and the industrial north, where tripe dressers sold the stomach ready-boiled by the pound and tripe shops were a fixture of mill towns into the twentieth century. Its appearance in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a reminder that Oscar Tschirky's collection was a working reference for a large hotel kitchen rather than a menu of luxuries: it records plain, cheap cookery alongside the terrapin and the canvasback. The dish also depends on a trade that has largely disappeared in America. Cleaning and blanching tripe is slow, smelly work, and the nineteenth-century cook could presumably take it for granted that someone else had done it, which is why a recipe that would now take an afternoon could be written as a twenty-five-minute boil.