No. 1472

Tripe a la Poulette with Mushrooms

Gras-double a la Poulette aux Champignons

Select previously well cleansed raw, fat and very fresh tripe, blanch it for ten minutes and when drained cool it off, cut it into large pieces and put them into a stock-pot with water, salt, allspice, carrots, onion with two cloves, and a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf; let boil very gently on a slow fire for eight hours keeping the cover on close, then put the tripe aside to cool in its own water. Drain and wipe it off, and cut it into two inch by one-half inch pieces, then fry them in butter without attaining a color; drain off the butter, cover the tripe with an allemande sauce (No. 407), and just when ready to serve incorporate into it a piece of fine butter, some chopped parsley and minced mushrooms, and a little lemon juice.

← No. 1471 Tripe a la Mode de Caen Beef No. 1473 Tripe a la Tartare →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes raw tripe straight from the butcher and a coal range that will hold a bare simmer all day. Modern tripe arrives largely pre-cooked, which changes the arithmetic more than anything else in the recipe.

The hinge: allemande sauce must not boilAllemande (No. 407) is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Once the yolks are in, hold the sauce below about 180F; a boil will curdle it into grains no amount of whisking recovers. The final butter, parsley, mushrooms and lemon go in off the heat.
Tripe today is not raw tripeMost honeycomb tripe sold in the US and UK comes cleaned, bleached and at least partly cooked. It will often be tender in roughly 1 1/2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering rather than eight. Test with a knife rather than a clock; it should yield like a well-braised shoulder, not like rubber.
"Fat tripe" (gras-double)The French term means the rumen, the plain first stomach, rather than the honeycomb second stomach. Honeycomb is what most butchers stock and works perfectly well here.
The blanchTen minutes in boiling water, then a cold rinse, is still worth doing even with cleaned tripe. It firms the surface and removes the last of the ammoniac smell before the long simmer.
Onion with two clovesAn oignon piqué: a peeled onion with two whole cloves pushed into it, fished out with the carrot and herbs before serving. Allspice here means whole berries, half a dozen or so, not ground.
Cooling in its own liquidNot a fussy step. The tripe reabsorbs gelatine and seasoning as it cools, and cold tripe cuts into clean strips where warm tripe tears. Refrigerate it in the broth overnight if convenient.
Frying without colorMedium-low heat, enough butter to coat, three or four minutes. The point is to dry the surface and take on butter flavor, not to brown; browning works against the pale color of the finished sauce.
MushroomsSweat the minced mushrooms in butter first and add their liquid to the sauce, or they will thin it at the last minute.
YieldThe original gives none. Two pounds of tripe with about a pint of allemande serves four to six as a main course.

A Little History

A la poulette means neither chicken nor young hen on the plate; it describes the sauce, a velouté enriched with egg yolks, butter and lemon, the same treatment given to mussels, sweetbreads and frog's legs in nineteenth-century French kitchens. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that kitchen's repertoire, and he gives tripe three consecutive numbers here, sandwiched between the Norman a la mode de Caen and an a la Tartare. That an expensive American restaurant kept several tripe preparations on file says something about the period: offal was cheap, but a dish that demanded a long slow cooking and a liaison sauce that could break in seconds was a demonstration of technique rather than thrift.