Soused Tripe
After preparing it according to directions in "How to cut and cure meats," place in a stone jar in layers, seasoning every layer with pepper and salt, and pour over boiling vinegar, in which, if desired, a few whole cloves, a sprinkle of mace, and a stick of cinnamon have been boiled; or cover with the jelly or liquor in which the tripe was boiled. When wanted for table, take out of jar, scrape off the liquid, and either broil, fricassee, fry in butter, or fry plain. -Mrs. Eliza T. Carson, Mt. Pleasant Farm.
This is a room-temperature meat preserve with no measured quantities, no stated acidity and no storage temperature, and it depends on a curing procedure printed elsewhere in the book. The notes below explain the terms and why the method does not stand up.
- No acid controlThe whole preservative effect rests on "boiling vinegar" poured over layered meat, with no ratio, no strength of vinegar and no check that the finished brine is acidic enough throughout. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely in acetic acid content, and boiled spices, meat juices and the tripe itself all dilute and buffer it. A meat pickle that drifts above roughly pH 4.6 is a growth medium, not a preserve.
- The second option is the dangerous one"Or cover with the jelly or liquor in which the tripe was boiled" removes the acid entirely and leaves cooked meat in a moist, low-oxygen, unacidified jar. That is precisely the condition associated with Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is odourless and tasteless; the toxin is destroyed by sustained boiling, but the brief broiling or frying the recipe finishes with cannot be relied on to do it.
- Ambient storage in an open crockA stone jar in a pantry or cellar was assumed, not refrigeration. Repeatedly reaching into the crock to "take out of jar" recontaminates the remaining contents, and there is no seal, no processing time and no temperature anywhere in the instruction.
- Tripe is a high-risk starting materialTripe is the lining of a ruminant stomach and carries a heavy microbial load; commercial tripe is cleaned and scalded, and is often bleached, for that reason. Any keeping method for it needs verified time-and-temperature cooking followed by cold storage, neither of which this recipe supplies. Use a current, tested recipe if you want to cook tripe.
- It depends on a missing step"According to directions in How to cut and cure meats" points to a separate chapter, so the cleaning, soaking and long boiling that make tripe edible are not on this page at all. The recipe as printed cannot be followed as a standalone procedure.
- Terms in the textA stone jar is a salt-glazed stoneware crock. "Broil" in an American book of this date means cooking over coals rather than under a modern element. "Fricassee" here means cutting the tripe up and stewing it in a sauce.
- Mace and cinnamon stickMace is the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than the nut itself; it and the cinnamon stick and cloves are flavour only and contribute nothing to preservation.
Souse, from the same root as the Old French sous for pickle or brine, was the standard English-language name for meat set in vinegar or in its own jelly, and it attached itself especially to the parts of the animal that were cheap, gelatinous and awkward: pig's feet, ears, head and tripe. Tripe cookery was a thrift tradition on both sides of the Atlantic, and a farm household that killed its own beef had a great deal of it to deal with at once, which is exactly why souse exists as a category. The recipe's shape is typical of such compilations, whose contents were gathered from named contributors like Mrs. Carson and printed with cross-references to the book's own meat-cutting chapter rather than restated in full. The vinegar-and-whole-spice pickle, and then the finishing broil or fry days or weeks later, reflect a kitchen where preserving and cooking were separate operations with a cellar in between.