No. 1477

Tripe Paupiettes

Paupiettes de Gras-double

Cut strips of cooked tripe four inches long by two inches wide; cover one side of these with a layer of cream forcemeat mingled with some chopped ham, cooked fine herbs; roll the strips up, and lay them in buttered tin rings; line a saucepan with slices of fat pork and slices of raw ham, carrots, celery, and minced onions, also a garnished bouquet; then place the paupiettes on top. Dilute it to the heighth of the rings with broth. Cover with a round piece of buttered paper, and put it to cook in a slack oven for two hours, adding a very small quantity of broth each time the gravy becomes too much reduced; when the paupiettes are well done, drain them, lay them in a sauté pan, pour over them their own gravy reduced to a half-glaze, and put them back into the oven; glaze and dress them on a very hot dish pouring over the gravy to which has been added a tomato sauce and a dash of cayenne pepper, straining the whole through a very fine sieve.

← No. 1476 Tripe, Parisian Style Beef No. 1478 Tripe with Cooked Fine Herbs →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have a larder full of standing preparations and a cook who knows what a slack oven is. Translated, this is a braise of stuffed tripe rolls in a vegetable-and-pork bed, finished with their own reduced juices.

"Cooked tripe" is the hingeSupermarket honeycomb tripe is cleaned and bleached but not cooked. It needs 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer in salted water with an onion and a bay leaf before it will be tender enough to roll and slice; if it goes into the rings underdone, two hours of braising will not save it.
Gras-doubleThe French term for tripe, particularly the flat rumen sheet, and strongly associated with Lyon. Honeycomb (bonnet) is the easiest to find and the best behaved here; you want pieces flat and even enough to cut into 4-by-2-inch strips.
Cream forcemeatRanhofer's farce à la crème is a quenelle forcemeat: lean veal or chicken pounded smooth, sieved, then worked over ice with egg white and heavy cream until it holds a soft shape. A food processor does the pounding; keep everything cold or it will break.
Cooked fine herbsNot raw chopped herbs. In this book it means a cooked mixture along the lines of a duxelles: chopped mushrooms, shallot and parsley sweated in butter, moistened with white wine and reduced dry. Fold it into the forcemeat cold.
Buttered tin ringsTimbale or plain pastry rings, about 1.5 to 2 inches across, used to hold each roll upright and cylindrical. Metal ring molds work; so does tying each paupiette with two turns of kitchen twine, which is easier to manage and removed the same way.
Slack ovenAround 275-300F. The braise should barely tremble for the full two hours. Higher heat drives off the liquid faster than you can top it up and toughens the forcemeat.
The liningFat pork, raw ham, carrot, celery and onion under the paupiettes is a matignon-style bed: it flavours the braise and keeps the rolls off direct heat. The "garnished bouquet" is a bouquet garni. Discard the vegetables at the end; the flavour has gone into the gravy.
Half-glaze and the finishStrain the braising liquid, skim it hard, and reduce until it coats a spoon and glosses the rolls as you baste. Then thin with tomato sauce, add cayenne, and strain again through a fine sieve so the sauce goes out clear.
YieldNot given. Figure two or three paupiettes per person as a course; how many strips you get from a given weight of cooked tripe depends heavily on how thick the sheet is, so cut first and count, rather than working from weight.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reads as a working reference for a professional brigade rather than a book for home cooks -- hence the cross-references, the assumed stock preparations, and the terse imperatives. Tripe was cheap offal everywhere, but gras-double had a serious French pedigree, above all in Lyon, and a restaurant kitchen could take the least fashionable cut in the market and make it a plated course by treating it as a paupiette: the same roll-and-braise technique applied to veal scallops, sole fillets or cabbage leaves. Everything expensive here is in the wrapping and the sauce -- forcemeat, ham, mushrooms, a reduced brown gravy lifted with tomato -- which is precisely the economics that made French haute cuisine attractive to American restaurateurs. Tomato sauce turns up throughout Ranhofer as a routine finishing element.