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Stewed Tripe, Creole
Cut one and a half pounds very fresh honey-comb tripe into julienne strips and keep on a plate. Heat two tablespoons oil in a frying pan, add two finely minced green peppers, two small, finely sliced onions, and brown them for ten minutes, occasionally stirring. Add four peeled and crushed red tomatoes, half bean finely chopped garlic, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and half teaspoon each salt and sugar. Mix all well and let gently cook for thirty minutes, frequently mixing meanwhile, and keep hot. Heat a tablespoon oil in a frying pan, add the tripe, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, mix a little and briskly fry for fifteen minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile. Drain the tripe on a sieve and add it to the Creole sauce, mix well, cook for five minutes more, dress on a hot, deep dish and serve.
A straightforward tomato-pepper braise whose success turns almost entirely on the state of the tripe before it reaches the pan. The recipe assumes a butcher's tripe that has already been long-boiled; supermarket tripe has not.
- Tripe needs cooking before it needs fryingHoneycomb tripe sold today is scalded and cleaned but still raw and rubbery. Simmer it in salted water with a bay leaf and onion for 1.5 to 3 hours, until a knife goes through easily, then cool and cut into julienne. Fifteen minutes in a frying pan will not tenderise it.
- "Very fresh"Tripe spoils faster than most meats, which is why the recipe insists on it. Buy it well within date, rinse it, and use it the same day; it should smell clean, not sour or ammoniac.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon. That is a generous amount of black pepper and about right for the dish.
- Half a bean of garlic"bean" here means a piece of garlic roughly the size of a bean, i.e. about a clove. Half of that is very restrained by modern taste; two or three cloves suit the quantity of tomato better.
- The tomatoesFour peeled and crushed red tomatoes is roughly 1 to 1.5 lb of ripe fruit. A 14 oz tin of whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand, is a fair substitute out of season, and the half teaspoon of sugar will help balance their acidity.
- The oilThe recipe specifies only "oil"; olive oil suits the dish, and a neutral oil works. The peppers and onions are meant to brown, not sweat, so keep the pan hot enough for colour over the full ten minutes.
- Frying the tripe separatelyThe point of frying and then draining the tripe is to drive off water and put a little colour on the strips before they meet the sauce. Do it in two batches if the pan is crowded, or the tripe will steam.
- YieldA pound and a half of tripe with the sauce serves four as a main course with rice or bread, more as part of a larger meal.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book around dishes labelled by nation and region, and his "Creole" almost always signals the same thing: tomatoes, green peppers, onion and garlic, the Louisiana kitchen reduced to a sauce formula that a hotel line could reproduce anywhere. Tripe itself was cheap offal eaten across Europe and the American South, and cooks handled it much as they handled other tough cuts, with long simmering and a sharply seasoned sauce. The labelling of regional American dishes alongside the French and Italian entries suggests how the period understood such food: as one more cuisine to be catalogued, its name doing the work of describing a place its readers were unlikely to have visited.