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Tripe, Montecello
Cut two pounds fresh honeycomb tripe in one-inch squares and keep on a plate. Heat in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, add two tabelespoons flour, stir well, then pour in a pint hot milk, mix well until it comes to a boil, then add twelve small peeled white onions and the tripe. Season with level teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix. Cover pan and slowly cook forty minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Add two tablespoons sherry and twelve medium, freshly opened oysters, lightly mix, then boil ten minutes, pour in a half gill cream; mix a little, pour into a deep dish and serve.
A white-sauce tripe stew of the kind that filled the cheaper end of a Gilded Age menu. Two things in the original need rethinking: the cooking time for the tripe and the cooking time for the oysters.
- The tripe is the hinge"fresh" here probably means raw or only lightly dressed rather than fully cooked, and forty minutes will not tenderise it. Tripe sold today is usually bleached and par-boiled but still needs 1.5 to 3 hours of gentle simmering in water before it is pleasant to eat. Simmer it separately until a knife goes through easily, then cut it into squares and give it the forty minutes in the sauce as written.
- Oysters, ten minutesBoiling shucked oysters for ten minutes turns them to erasers and thins the sauce with their liquor. Add them in the last two to three minutes, off a hard boil, just until the edges ruffle.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So two saltspoons cayenne is about half a teaspoon, which is assertive for a pint of milk sauce; start with half that if you are unsure, and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg is plenty.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so this is about a quarter cup. Stir it in off the heat so the sauce does not break.
- Butter and flourOne and a half tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour is a slightly lean roux for a pint of milk; the sauce is meant to be thin enough to cook the onions in. Equal parts, about two tablespoons each, gives a more stable result.
- The onionsTwelve small peeled white onions means pearl or boiling onions, not scallions. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and will be tender in the forty minutes; larger boiling onions may want to be halved.
- SherryUse a dry or medium amontillado, not cream sherry, and not "cooking sherry," which is salted.
- YieldTwo pounds of tripe with a pint of sauce serves four generously as a main course, with bread or boiled potatoes.
Tripe was cheap, and cheap food in a grand American cookbook is almost always dressed up with a place name and a spoonful of sherry to make it respectable. This one belongs to the tradition of hotel and restaurant cookery in which dishes were often labelled for a person, a city or a country house, so that a kitchen could run dozens of variations on the same few techniques and a menu could look inexhaustible; "Montecello" is generally taken to be Monticello, the Virginia name, though the book offers no explanation. The combination of tripe, milk, onions and oysters is not fanciful invention: creamed tripe with onions is an old English and Northern European treatment, oysters were still abundant and cheap in East Coast markets when this book was compiled, and adding them to a white stew was routine rather than luxurious. Honeycomb tripe, the second stomach of the ox, was specified then for the same reason it is specified now, being often said to be the tenderest of the four and prized chiefly for its texture and its knack of holding sauce.