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Stewed Tripe
From Lady Harriet St. Clair's Dainty Dishes.
Select two pounds of double tripe well cleaned and blanched, cut in pieces of rather less than a quarter of a pound each, put in a clean stew-pan with a pint of milk and one of water, two teaspoonfuls of salt, one of pepper, eight middle-sized onions carefully peeled; set it on to boil, which it should do at first rather fast, then simmer till done, which will be in rather more than half an hour Put it into a deep dish or tureen and serve with the milk and onions.
A plain Victorian tripe-and-onion stew that depends entirely on the state of the tripe you start with. Everything else is straightforward.
- The half hour only works on dressed tripeLady Harriet assumed tripe bought from a tripe dresser: scraped, blanched and already boiled for hours. Supermarket or butcher tripe sold raw needs 1.5 to 3 hours of gentle simmering before it is tender, so check the label or ask; if it is not sold as cooked, give it that time in the milk and water before the onions can be judged done.
- "Double tripe"Generally taken to mean the thick, doubled seam tripe rather than the thinner blanket or honeycomb cuts, though the older names overlap and are not used consistently (thick seam and reed tripe, for instance, are not the same thing). Honeycomb is what most butchers stock now; it will serve here, and tends to cook a little faster.
- BlanchingIf your tripe smells strongly, a preliminary blanch in fresh water for ten minutes, drained and rinsed, does what the old dressers did last. Do not blanch in the cooking milk.
- Milk and scorchingA pint of milk and a pint of water; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so roughly 2 1/2 US cups each. Milk catches on the bottom of a pan the moment it is left alone at a hard boil, so take the "rather fast" boil literally for a minute or two only, then drop to the barest simmer and stir up from the base now and then.
- The pepperA full teaspoon of pepper in a two-pound stew is aggressive by modern taste; halving it is safer if you are unsure. The two teaspoons of salt are reasonable for the volume of liquid.
- The onionsEight medium onions go in whole and peeled, and are served whole alongside the tripe. Trim the root end flat but leave it intact so they hold together through the simmer.
- Serving and thickeningServes four generously. The liquor stays thin as written; some later recipes for tripe and onions finish it with a spoonful of flour worked into butter, stirred in at the end, and serve it over toast or with boiled potatoes.
The source credited here, Dainty Dishes by Lady Harriet St. Clair, was a Scottish collection first published in the 1860s that ran through many editions; The Home Cook Book, put together in Chicago in the 1870s by a committee of local women, borrowed freely from such books alongside its subscribers' own contributions. Tripe in milk with onions is a northern British dish above all, associated with Lancashire and the industrial towns, where tripe dressers sold the stomach already scraped, blanched and boiled so that little remained to be done at home. That trade is the reason the timing in this recipe looks impossibly short today: the long, dull, smelly part of the job had been done by someone else before the tripe ever reached the kitchen.