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Broiled Tripe
After cutting six two-inch-square pieces fresh and well-cleaned honeycomb tripe, season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Lightly roll the pieces in a tablespoon oil. Arrange them on a broiler and broil for five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish and serve.
A three-line recipe that assumes something no longer true: that the tripe reaching your kitchen has already been given hours of cooking. Everything depends on that.
- Pre-cook the tripe first"Fresh and well-cleaned" tripe from a 1900 butcher had usually been scalded and long-boiled before sale. Most tripe today is bleached and blanched only, which is not the same thing: simmer it in salted water or milk for 1½ to 2 hours until a knife goes through easily, then cool it before seasoning. Five minutes a side on raw tripe produces something like a rubber eraser.
- Honeycomb, specificallyHoneycomb is the second stomach, and its pocketed surface is what makes it worth broiling — the cavities catch oil and char. Blanket or book tripe is flatter and denser and does not behave the same way under direct heat.
- Broiler heatA coal or gas broiler of the period meant direct radiant heat, close in. Use the upper rack under a preheated broiler or a very hot grill; the goal is blistering and browned edges, not further cooking.
- Press it flatCooked tripe curls. Chill it under a weighted plate before cutting the two-inch squares so the pieces sit flat on the grate and brown evenly.
- Oil and seasoningA tablespoon of oil for six pieces is barely a film, which is correct — excess oil flares under a broiler. White pepper is probably specified so no dark flecks show against the pale tripe; black pepper works and simply looks different.
- Yield and servingSix two-inch squares is one generous portion or two small ones as a first course. "Dress on a hot dish" means a warmed plate — tripe stiffens fast as it cools. Mustard, a sharp vinaigrette, or melted butter with lemon are the usual accompaniments.
Tripe was cheap protein throughout the nineteenth century and appears in nearly every general cookbook of the era, usually stewed with onions and milk in the English manner or served à la lyonnaise in the French. Broiling is the plainest treatment of all, and its brevity here is a fair index of how tripe was sold: tripe dressers were a distinct trade in city markets, and their product usually reached the cook already partly prepared. Filippini's book, drawing on his years in the kitchens of Delmonico's, files the dish among the world's everyday cookery rather than its luxuries — a grill-cook's item, dispatched in ten minutes and sent out on a hot plate.