Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Tripe
This is usually bought ready prepared, but as instances may occur when the cook may have to clean it, the following instructions may be useful: Wash the stomach well as soon as it is taken from the bullock, changing the water several times; dust the dark inside coat with quicklime, and scrape it at once. Cut it up into four parts, dip them into boiling water, and scrape them until they become perfectly white. Put them into a bowl with a weak brine thickened with meal, and allow them to remain for a day. Scrape and soak them in this way for seven or eight days, then put them into a saucepan with oatmeal gruel to cover, and boil it until tender. The tripe should be tied up in a cloth. Turn it out of the cloth, place it in a bowl of weak brine, let it remain for a day or so, and it is then ready for use. Or put the pieces of the stomach of a fat bullock, one at a time, in a saucepan of water, and warm them; remove, scrape well, put them into a bowl of slightly salted water, wash them well, change the water daily, and allow them to soak for five or six days, by which time they should be quite white. Place them in a saucepan of water and boil them; if not required for immediate use, keep them in vinegar. Tripe a la Mode de Caen Take five or six pounds of double tripe, one cow heel, three calf's feet, all well washed and cleaned in fresh water, and cut them into pieces two inches long by one inch square. Have handy an earthenware pot or saucepan, place some of the pieces of feet at the bottom, cover over with tripe, then a layer of sliced onions and carrots, and continue the same until the vessel is full, seasoning each layer. Tie up in a cloth a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, a dozen whole peppers and half a dozen cloves; place this in the middle of the pot, and pour over one pint of cider or white wine and a wineglassful of brandy. Cover the top over with some stalks of green leeks, parsley roots and cabbage leaves, put the lid on the pan, fastening it down with paste, so that the steam cannot escape, and leave it for ten hours in a very slow oven. Serve it on a hot dish.
Two separate procedures sit on this page: a household method for dressing raw tripe straight from the slaughtered animal, and the Norman braise that follows it. The first cannot be reproduced safely in a domestic kitchen, and it contaminates the page as a set of instructions.
- Quicklime is not a food ingredientCalcium oxide dusted onto the dark rumen lining is strongly caustic and reacts with moisture on contact, generating heat and calcium hydroxide. It burns skin, eyes and airways, and there is no measured rinse or neutralisation step here to establish that none remains on the meat.
- Seven or eight days in weak brineRaw stomach tissue held for a week in an unrefrigerated bowl of "weak brine thickened with meal" has no measured salt concentration and no temperature control. Meal in the liquid feeds bacterial growth. The visual endpoint given is colour — "perfectly white" — which says nothing about microbial load.
- The second method is no saferWarming the pieces, then soaking in "slightly salted water" with a daily change for five or six days, is a straightforward ambient hold of raw offal. Salted enough to be safe would be salted far beyond what the finished dish could carry.
- Buy it dressedOscar's own first line is the sound one: tripe "is usually bought ready prepared." Modern tripe reaches the shop scalded, bleached and often partly cooked. Nothing in the cleaning passage needs to be repeated by anyone.
- For the braise, use a current recipeTripe à la mode de Caen is still cooked, and a modern version will specify the state of the tripe you start from, the oven setting and the total time. Take those figures from a present-day source rather than from this page.
- What the terms mean"Double tripe" is a butcher's term for the thicker stomach tissue; which stomachs it covers is not specified here. "Cow heel" is the foot and lower leg, sold for its gelatine, as are the calf's feet. A wineglassful was conventionally reckoned at about two fluid ounces. The paste sealing the lid is flour-and-water luting, used to trap steam in a period oven that leaked heat.
Tripe à la mode de Caen is the signature dish of lower Normandy, and its identity rests on three local things: the four stomachs of the ox, a long sealed bake in an earthenware tripière, and cider — with brandy that in Normandy means calvados — in place of the wine used elsewhere in France. The confraternity that promotes the dish in Caen dates its pedigree to the medieval town, though the specific attributions repeated in guidebooks are traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection reflects how the Waldorf kitchen worked: French classics cooked for New York diners, with a maître d'hôtel compiling the house repertoire. The long cleaning passage is a period fossil. Oscar concedes that tripe is normally bought ready dressed, but includes the abattoir-to-bowl method against the chance that a cook somewhere had to start from a whole stomach — a reminder of how recently the American kitchen stood close to the killing floor.