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July 18
Menu: Onion Soup; Fricasseed Tripe; Baked Potatoes Stringless Beans; Tomatoes Stuffed with Pineapple; Bisque Ice Cream Coffee Fricasseed Tripe-Cut 2 pounds of tripe into narrow strips, add ½ cup of water, 2 cups milk, season with salt and pepper, add 1/4 cup Crisco mixed with 2 tablespoons flour; simmer for 30 minutes and serve hot. A little chopped parsley is an improvement.
A plain milk fricassee that assumes the cook has already dealt with the tripe. Everything hinges on that assumption.
- Tripe must be tender before it goes inThirty minutes of simmering will not tenderize raw or merely blanched tripe. Tripe of this period was usually sold part-cooked rather than raw, and supermarket honeycomb tripe today is cleaned and sometimes parboiled, but it will generally need a further 1½ to 3 hours of gentle simmering in water before it is soft enough to cut and finish this way.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so every fat is Crisco. Use any neutral solid shortening, or butter, which suits the milk sauce better. The quantity, a quarter cup to 2 tablespoons flour, is a fat-heavy roux; equal weights of butter and flour will give a cleaner sauce.
- Making the sauce workAs written, the fat and flour are stirred into the pan cold, which tends to leave lumps and a raw-flour taste. Cook the fat and flour together for two or three minutes first, then whisk in the warmed milk and water off the heat before returning it to a bare simmer.
- Keep it below a boilA milk sauce this thin will catch and scorch on the bottom of the pan at a full boil, and the flour is not enough to stabilize it fully. Hold it at a lazy simmer and stir the base of the pan regularly.
- SeasoningTripe is bland and the sauce is white; the recipe's salt and pepper are the minimum. A bay leaf, a slice of onion in the milk, a grate of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon at the end all belong to the tradition and are worth adding.
- YieldTwo pounds of tripe with sauce serves four generously as a main course, six as part of a larger meal. Serve over toast, boiled potatoes or plain rice to take up the sauce.
Tripe — the stomach lining of a cow, usually the honeycomb second stomach — was cheap protein in every industrial city on both sides of the Atlantic, and a milk-and-onion stew of it is a traditional way it is prepared in Britain and the northern United States. Fricassee, from the French, means meat cut up and cooked in a light sauce rather than browned and roasted, and by 1913 the word in American cookbooks signified little more than "in a white sauce." This particular version appears in The Story of Crisco, published by Procter & Gamble to introduce the first mass-market hydrogenated vegetable shortening; the book's "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a dish to each day of the year, and the entries generally seem meant to show that the new fat could stand in for lard or butter anywhere a household already used them. That a July dinner suggestion is stewed tripe says something about how routine offal still was on the American table before the First World War.