No. 1473

Tripe a la Tartare

Gras-double a la Tartare

Have some well cooked honey-combed tripe; cut it into two-inch squares, put it in a bowl, seasoning it with salt, pepper, parsley and chopped onion; sprinkle over some oil and lemon juice, and let the tripe macerate in a cool place for one hour. Drain it off, and dip each piece in melted butter and fresh bread-crumbs, then broil them on a slow fire. Dress the tripe on a very hot dish, and serve at the same time, but separately, a sauce-bowl of tartar sauce.

← No. 1472 Tripe a la Poulette with Mushrooms Beef No. 1474 Tripe Baked with Parmesan Cheese →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes the tripe is already cooked, which is where nearly all the work lies. Everything after that is a quick marinade, a crumb coat and a careful grilling.

"Well cooked" tripe is the whole jobSupermarket honeycomb tripe sold as "cleaned" or "bleached" is raw. It needs simmering in salted, acidulated water until a knife slides through with no resistance, generally 2 to 3 hours, and it should be cooled before cutting. Tripe that is merely tender-ish will be rubbery under the broiler.
Honeycomb, specificallyThe second stomach chamber, with the lattice surface. It holds the crumb coating far better than smooth blanket tripe and is worth asking a butcher for by name.
The marinadeOil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, parsley and onion for one hour is a light French marinade, not a tenderiser "
Drain and dryDrain thoroughly and blot the pieces. Wet tripe will not hold melted butter, and the crumbs will slide off on the grill bars.
"Broil on a slow fire"This means a moderate charcoal fire or a broiler rack set well back from the element, around 6 to 8 inches. The aim is to colour the crumbs and heat the tripe through, about 4 to 5 minutes a side. High heat scorches the breadcrumbs before the butter under them has done anything.
Bread-crumbs"Fresh" here means crumbs from the interior of a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy kind in a canister. They brown to a coarser, better texture.
Tartar sauceThe period sauce is mayonnaise with chopped capers, gherkins, onion or shallot and herbs, sometimes with sieved hard-boiled yolk worked in. Serve it cold and separate, as directed; poured over, it slackens the crust.
YieldTwo pounds of cooked tripe cut into two-inch squares serves four as a main course, six as an appetiser.

A Little History

Tripe was one of the cheapest things a butcher sold and one of the most laboriously prepared, which made it a standing test of a kitchen's patience rather than its budget. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, gives it a full run of treatments in The Epicurean (1894) — à la mode de Caen, à la poulette, baked with Parmesan — and this one is the grilled version, made with the cut the French call gras-double, the ordinary dish of the Lyonnais bouchon, dressed up with a sauceboat. The "à la tartare" tag in nineteenth-century French cooking generally signals two things together: a breadcrumbed item grilled rather than fried, and cold tartar sauce alongside; the same formula appears applied to chicken and to pig's trotters. The name carries no real connection to Central Asian cooking; a shared origin with steak tartare is sometimes suggested, but steak tartare is itself generally held to take its name from the sauce, and the link is best treated as folk etymology.