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Tripe, Petite Russie
Thoroughly clean three pounds of fresh honeycombed tripe, place in a saucepan with two quarts water, one teaspoon salt, and boil for two hours. Remove and plunge it in cold water for five minutes, drain and cut it in long, thin strips. Cut very fine two each onions, leeks, branches crisp celery, and fry them in stew pan with a spoonful melted butter until slightly brown. Add two tablespoons flour, stir well while heating for one minute, pour in a half pint broth, and mix well until it comes to boil. Add tripe with a teaspoon each chopped parsley and salt, a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and cook for fifteen minutes, mixing once in a while. Dilute two egg yolks with a gill cream and the juice of a sound quarter of lemon, add to pan and mix well while heating for two minutes. Transfer tripe to a deep dish, arrange six bread croutons around dish and serve.
A straightforward braise finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The one thing that will ruin it is letting that liaison boil.
- The hinge: the liaisonEgg yolks slaked with cream and lemon juice will curdle into grains the moment they reach a simmer. Pull the pan off direct heat, temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of the hot sauce first, then return it and hold it below a shiver for the two minutes given.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne and nutmeg are each a quarter teaspoon. A half pint of broth is one cup.
- Buying tripeHoneycomb tripe is the second stomach and is what you want here. Almost all tripe sold now is already scalded and bleached, so the "thoroughly clean" step amounts to a rinse and a scrub rather than the long scraping the original assumed.
- The first boilTwo hours in salted water is a starting point, not a rule. Modern pre-cleaned tripe can need anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours to turn tender and translucent; test with a knife before you take it out, because the fifteen minutes in the sauce will not soften it further.
- The cold plungeChilling the boiled tripe firms it so it slices more cleanly into strips, though the five minutes given will only cool the surface.
- LeeksUse the white and pale green only, and wash the sliced rings in a bowl of water to drop the grit before frying with the onion and celery.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt goes into the sauce on top of the teaspoon already in the cooking water. Taste before adding it all; commercial broth is far saltier than the household stock this book assumed.
- YieldThree pounds of tripe and six croutons point to six servings as a main course, with rice, boiled potatoes or bread to carry the sauce.
"Petite Russie" is Little Russia, a name long used in French for Ukraine and neighbouring lands. The finish may be what earned the label: egg yolks, cream and acid stirred into a hot broth at the last moment resembles the enrichment of Eastern European sour soups, here set in French restaurant grammar with a roux and a base of onion, leek and celery -- though that connection is a reading of the dish, not something the recipe states. Tripe was cheap offal across Europe and many regional kitchens had a version, from Norman tripes a la mode de Caen to Polish flaki, which shares the strips, broth and warm spicing. National labels in cookbooks of this period are often loose, and this one is probably better read as a French-trained cook's impression of a Slavic dish than as a recipe carried directly from a Kyiv kitchen.