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Potage, Pepper Pot
Finely chop two each medium, white onions, green peppers and leeks. Place these in a medium-sized saucepan with half ounce butter and cook for ten minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile; then add four ounces fresh tripe, cut into small dice-pieces, and two ounces raw Italian rice. Moisten with two and a half quarts white broth or hot water, then add one pound of raw, clean veal bones. Season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Cover the pan and let slowly boil for thirty minutes. Peel and cut into eight pieces each three medium, red tomatoes and add to the soup, lightly mix, then let boil for thirty-five minutes. Remove the bones, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A tripe-and-rice soup in the pepper pot family, built like a light minestrone rather than the thick, peppery Caribbean stew the name usually suggests. The main adjustments concern the tripe and the rice, which the original timings do not really suit.
- Tripe is the hingeTripe sold today is "dressed" — scalded and bleached, but not tender. Diced small it still wants an hour or more of gentle simmering before it stops being rubbery, so blanch and pre-simmer it separately, or start it in the broth well ahead of the rice. The recipe's total of 65 minutes suggests the tripe was expected to arrive already partly cooked, as tripe sold by butchers often was.
- Add the rice laterTwo ounces of raw rice boiled for the full 65 minutes will collapse into starch and thicken the soup into porridge. Add it about 18-20 minutes before serving; "Italian rice" here means a short- or medium-grain rice of the Piedmont type, for which arborio or a similar modern Italian medium-grain is a convenient stand-in.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock — veal or chicken bones and aromatics simmered without roasting, so the soup stays pale. Unsalted or lightly salted homemade stock is closest; if using commercial stock, cut the salt below.
- SaltA level tablespoon into two and a half quarts is reasonable with plain water and raw bones, but excessive with a salted commercial broth. Season at the end instead.
- Green peppersSweet bell peppers, not chilies. The heat in this version comes only from the half teaspoon of black pepper, which is modest for the volume — grind more in at the table.
- The veal bonesOne pound of raw bones is there for body and gelatin, not meat. A cracked knuckle or shin piece works best; rinse well and skim the surface during the first ten minutes of simmering.
- TomatoesThree medium fresh tomatoes, peeled and cut into eighths as the recipe directs, will largely dissolve over 35 minutes. Out of season, a scant cup of drained canned tomatoes is closer to the intent than pale winter fruit.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts before reduction, so roughly eight servings as a first course, five or six as a main.
Pepper pot travelled from the Caribbean into North American and European cookbooks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it splintered into several very different dishes: the cassareep-based Guyanese stew, the callaloo-and-greens versions of the islands, and the tripe-and-pepper soup that Philadelphia adopted as its own and that is often said — on no firm evidence — to have been improvised for Washington's army at Valley Forge. What appears here is a restaurant cook's reading of the Philadelphia type, filed under "Potage" and given an Italian accent with rice and fresh tomatoes in place of the usual potato and dumpling. One might infer from this page that a professional kitchen of the period could treat regional names as headings to be interpreted in the house style, so that a soup kept its title while the ingredient list drifted a long way from its source.