No. 1474

Tripe Baked with Parmesan Cheese

Gras-double Parmesan au Gratin

Have some very fresh cooked tripe; cut it into one and a quarter inch squares arrange them on a buttered dish in layers, besprinkle each layer with pepper and grated parmesan cheese, and pour over a tomato sauce mixed with an espagnole sauce and a little good gravy, dredge over the top some bread-crumbs and more grated parmesan, pour over some butter and brown in a hot oven.

← No. 1473 Tripe a la Tartare Beef No. 1475 Tripe Lyonnaise →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional larder: tripe already boiled tender and two mother sauces standing ready. Everything hinges on the tripe being fully cooked and tender before it goes near the gratin dish — the oven stage is only for browning and will not soften it.

"Very fresh cooked tripe"Supermarket tripe is usually sold bleached and partly cleaned but still raw. Simmer it in salted water with an onion, a carrot and a bay leaf until a knife goes through with no resistance — typically 1½ to 3 hours for honeycomb tripe — then cool before cutting. Bought pre-cooked tripe still benefits from a check for tenderness.
Espagnole sauceA brown veal stock sauce thickened with dark roux and flavored with mirepoix and tomato, then long-reduced. Few home kitchens keep it. A well-reduced brown veal or beef stock thickened lightly, or a good demi-glace, stands in; the "little good gravy" is simply pan juices or more reduced stock.
Sauce proportionsNone are given. Aim for roughly two parts tomato sauce to one part brown sauce, and enough total sauce to come about two-thirds up the layered tripe — around 1½ cups of sauce per pound of tripe. It should be loose enough to bubble through, not soupy.
"A hot oven"No temperature is given; in modern terms treat it as roughly 425-450F. At that heat the crumb and cheese crust colors in about 15-20 minutes, by which time the sauce should be bubbling at the edges. Finish under the broiler for a minute if the top is still pale.
ParmesanGrate it from a wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana. Pre-grated tubs contain anti-caking starch and brown poorly, going gritty rather than crisp.
The buttered dishA shallow gratin dish, not a deep casserole — depth of about 1½ inches. Tripe layered too thickly heats unevenly and the crust is done long before the center is hot.
Butter over the topMelt it and drizzle, roughly 2 tablespoons for a family-sized dish. Dotting cold butter leaves the crumbs unevenly moistened and they scorch where they are dry.
YieldTwo pounds of cooked tripe with sauce fills a 9x13 dish and serves six as a main course, more as one course of a longer menu.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of the restaurant's repertoire, which is why a humble organ meat appears here under a French title: gras-double is the French butcher's term for the thick, fatty first stomach lining of beef, and au gratin refers to the browned crust rather than to any particular dish. Tripe was cheap, universally available and, in nineteenth-century kitchens, treated as a serious ingredient rather than a curiosity — Ranhofer gives a run of tripe preparations in sequence, à la Tartare, Lyonnaise, and this Parmesan gratin, each one a standard sauce or garnish applied to the same base. The Parmesan and tomato combination points to the Italian influence already present in French professional cooking of the period; a dish built this way, with cheese, crumbs and brown sauce over an inexpensive cut, was the kind of thing that let a restaurant put a low-cost item on a long menu without lowering the tone.