No. 1478

Tripe with Cooked Fine Herbs

Gras-double aux Fines Herbes Cuites

Take some white, fresh, and well-cooked tripe; cut it into strips of one and a half by one inch, and fry them in butter. Fry separately in butter some chopped onions and shallots, some chopped fresh mushrooms, and when the latter have evaporated their moisture, add half as much chopped truffles as there are mushrooms, then put in the tripe, seasoning it all with salt, pepper, a little lemon juice, some meat glaze and a very little tomato puree, sprinkle over some chopped parsley.

VEAL (Veau).

← No. 1477 Tripe Paupiettes Beef No. 1479 Brains a l'Aurora →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes the tripe has already been through the long preliminary boil that any nineteenth-century kitchen took for granted, so the whole dish here is a fifteen-minute sauté. Everything depends on that assumption being true.

"Well-cooked" tripe is the hingeHoneycomb tripe needs 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, in water with a little salt, an onion and a bay leaf, until a knife slips through with no resistance. Tripe sold today as "cleaned" or "bleached" is scrubbed, not cooked; frying underdone tripe in butter produces something like a rubber band and no amount of sauce will fix it.
Gras-doubleThe French term is generally used for tripe from the rumen or paunch (panse), as distinct from the honeycomb (bonnet) and the bible (feuillet), though usage varies and it can take in more than one stomach. Honeycomb is what most butchers and Latin or Asian markets carry now and works perfectly well.
Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown veal or beef stock reduced until it sets to a firm, syrupy jelly. A teaspoon or two is enough to gloss and bind the pan. A good commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute; ordinary stock will only water the dish down.
The mushrooms are a duxelles"When the latter have evaporated their moisture" is the whole instruction. Cook the chopped mushrooms over decent heat until the pan is dry and they begin to brown, or the finished dish will be grey and loose.
TrufflesHalf the volume of the mushrooms is an extravagance almost no one will reproduce. A tablespoon of finely chopped preserved truffle, or truffle peelings with a little of their liquor, gives the intended perfume; leave them out entirely rather than reach for truffle oil, and add a few dried porcini to the mushrooms instead.
Tomato puréeIn Ranhofer's usage this is a cooked, sieved, reduced tomato sauce rather than modern canned paste. Use paste sparingly, no more than a scant teaspoon, and only for colour and depth.
Seasoning orderLemon juice in small amounts cuts the richness of the offal; the recipe adds it with the other seasonings, so go carefully and taste as you go. Taste before adding more salt, since meat glaze -- especially commercial concentrate -- is already salty.
Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. Roughly 2 lb of cooked tripe, 1 large onion, 2 shallots, 8 oz mushrooms and a good tablespoon of parsley gives four generous main-course portions. Serve straight from the pan with bread or boiled potatoes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in The Epicurean (1894) among the beef entries because tripe is beef offal, though in a Delmonico's context it was less a peasant survival than a demonstration of range: a chef who could serve terrapin and canvasback could also turn the cheapest cut in the market into something worth a place on the menu. Fines herbes cuites is often described as a specific French formula rather than a loose sprinkle of green stuff, essentially a duxelles base of onion, shallot and mushroom cooked down dry, with the parsley added raw at the end; the same preparation is said to underlie a number of nineteenth-century dishes labelled aux fines herbes. Tripe cookery of this kind belongs to the same French provincial tradition as the Norman tripes à la mode de Caen, a long braise in which the softening of the stomach lining happens in the dish itself. The truffles are the giveaway that this is the Delmonico's version and not the bistro one.