No. 1475

Tripe Lyonnaise

Gras-double Lyonnaise

Have some fresh tripe, white and well cooked; cut it into strips two inches long by a quarter of an inch wide; mince four ounces of white onions, fry them slowly in a pan with half oil and half butter, in the meanwhile frying the tripe in another pan; when the contents of both have attained a nice color, mix them together and continue frying for ten minutes, tossing them constantly, when brown, season with salt, pepper, lemon juice or good vinegar and chopped parsley. Drain off the butter well and serve on a very hot dish.

← No. 1474 Tripe Baked with Parmesan Cheese Beef No. 1476 Tripe, Parisian Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a kitchen with cooked tripe already on hand, which is the whole difficulty of the dish today. Everything else is a fast sauté.

"White and well cooked" is the hingeTripe sold in the US is usually bleached and scalded but still raw and tough. It needs simmering in salted water, often with an onion and a bay leaf, until a strip yields easily to a knife — commonly 1<span>½</span> to 3 hours depending on whether it is honeycomb or blanket tripe. Frying raw tripe gives you something rubbery no amount of browning will fix.
Quantity, since none is givenFour ounces of onion suits roughly 1<span>½</span> to 2 lb of cooked tripe, which serves four as a main course or six as a first course.
Dry it before it hits the panBoiled tripe holds a great deal of water. Blot the strips well and let them air-dry on a rack, or they will steam rather than color, which is the failure mode of this dish.
Two pans, and mean itThe separate pans are not fussiness. Onions want slow heat to sweeten; tripe wants hot fat and room to brown. Combining them from the start gives soft onions and pale tripe.
Half oil, half butterThe oil is traditionally said to let the butter take more heat without burning, which is why the pairing is standard for a hot sauté. Any neutral oil works; clarified butter alone is also fine.
Acid goes in off the heatLemon juice or vinegar added at the end, away from the flame, stays sharp. Cooked into the pan it flattens out and you lose the point of it.
"Drain off the butter well"Tip the pan and spoon out the fat before plating. The dish should be glossy, not swimming, and a warmed serving dish keeps the tripe from going gummy as it cools.

A Little History

Gras-double is the French butcher's term for the rumen, the first stomach of the ox, and à la lyonnaise means simply "with onions" — Lyon's reputation for onion cookery is old enough that the phrase does duty for potatoes, eggs and sausage as well. Tripe belongs to the frugal end of French cooking, sold ready-cooked by the tripier, and Charles Ranhofer gives several tripe preparations in The Epicurean (1894), this one sitting between a tripe baked with Parmesan and a tripe Parisian style. That the recipe opens by asking for tripe already "white and well cooked" is a fair marker of the period: a professional brigade, or a city with a good tripe dealer, made the long preliminary boil somebody else's problem.