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December 23
Menu: Baked Tripe; Mashed Potatoes; Stuffed Onions; Baked Bean Salad; Cheese Balls; Stewed Figs, Whipped Cream; Coffee Baked Tripe-Cut tripe into goodsized pieces and spread over them the following stuffing: Mix together 4 tablespoons crumbs, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt, dust powdered mace, 1 tablespoon chopped cooked ham, 1 chopped onion, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 14 teaspoon pepper, dust paprika, and 1 well beaten egg. Roll them up and fasten with wooden toothpicks. Dredge with flour and spread on each 1 tablespoon Crisco. Bake in hot oven 30 minutes, basting frequently with melted Crisco and hot water. Garnish with lemon slices and pass melted butter.
A rolled, stuffed tripe from Crisco's calendar of dinners for December 24. The recipe assumes something a modern shopper cannot buy: tripe already boiled tender by the butcher.
- Pre-cook the tripe firstThis is the hinge. Tripe in 1913 was generally sold already scalded and part-boiled, so 30 minutes in the oven was largely browning. Tripe sold today is cleaned and bleached but essentially raw; it needs a long bare simmer, roughly 1.5 to 3 hours, until a knife slides in easily, before it can be stuffed and baked.
- "Hot oven"In period usage roughly 400 to 450F. At that heat the rolls colour quickly, which is the point once the tripe is already tender.
- The typo in the pepper"14 teaspoon pepper" is a printer's mangling of 1/4 teaspoon. Read it that way.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco was and is hydrogenated vegetable shortening; today's version is reformulated to remove trans fats and behaves much the same in a stuffing or as a basting fat. Butter, lard or oil all substitute without trouble here.
- CrumbsDry breadcrumbs from stale bread, not the sandy commercial kind. Four tablespoons of crumbs against three of fat plus an egg makes a fairly wet paste, which is what lets it cling to slippery tripe.
- Mace and paprikaA "dust" is a pinch. Mace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet; ground nutmeg is the usual stand-in, used sparingly.
- BastingMelted fat and hot water spooned over every 8 to 10 minutes. Tripe has almost no internal fat and dries to leather in a hot oven if left alone.
- ToothpicksWooden picks may darken or scorch at this heat. Count them going in and count them coming out before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of tripe and no number of servings. The lemon and melted butter are not decoration — the acid and fat are what make tripe palatable to many eaters.
Tripe — the stomach lining of an ox — was one of the standard economies of the American and British kitchen well into the twentieth century, and was generally sold part-boiled so that a cook only had to dress and finish it. Stuffing and rolling it, as here, is the same treatment given to beef olives or veal birds, borrowing a genteel technique for an offal cut. The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to promote a product then only two years on the market, and its 615 recipes and month-by-month dinner calendar were designed to show that the shortening could stand in for butter, lard and suet across the entire range of the household's cooking — including the frugal end of it. Tripe's retreat from American home cooking after mid-century took the pre-boiled butcher's version with it, which is why the timing in this recipe no longer works as written.