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Stewed Tripe
Melt a large tablespoonful of butter in an iron spider, add one finely-chopped onion, cook slowly until colored, add one tablespoonful of flour and brown it, then stir in gradually one-half of a pint of strong beef stock and as much stewed tomatoes. Add one pound and a half of boiled tripe cut into strips and season well with salt and pepper and a little curry powder. Cover and simmer very gently for ten minutes and it is ready to serve.
A short braise that assumes the hard work — cooking the tripe until tender — has already been done. Everything depends on that.
- Boiled tripe is the whole jobThe ten-minute simmer here only marries the sauce to the meat; it will not tenderise anything. Honeycomb tripe from a butcher or supermarket is cleaned and blanched but still rubbery, and needs 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer in salted water (some cooks add a splash of vinegar or a bay leaf) before it is cut into strips for this pan.
- Iron spiderA cast-iron skillet on three legs, meant to stand over coals. Any heavy 10-inch skillet or a shallow saucepan with a lid does the same work.
- Half a pintOne cup of beef stock, and the same volume again of stewed tomatoes — so two cups of liquid in total for 1½ lb of tripe. Canned diced tomatoes with their juice stand in for the stewed tomatoes.
- The rouxA large tablespoonful of butter and a tablespoonful of flour is a thin binding, not a thick gravy. Brown the flour properly -- a minute or two past pale gold -- or the sauce tastes of raw paste.
- Curry powderPeriod commercial curry powders were generally mild and turmeric-forward, and were typically used as a background seasoning rather than as a flavour in their own right. Half a teaspoon is in the spirit of the original; a modern hot Madras blend at the same quantity will take over the dish.
- Strong beef stockThe recipe leans on it for body. Use a well-reduced homemade stock or a good chilled fresh stock; a thin cube-based broth leaves the sauce watery, since nothing here simmers long enough to concentrate it.
- YieldServes four as a main course with boiled potatoes or bread, six as part of a larger meal.
Tripe -- the stomach lining of cattle -- was cheap protein in nineteenth-century American and British kitchens, and was often sold already scalded and part-boiled by the butcher, though the cook would usually still need to simmer it a good while before it was tender. That trade practice is probably why so many old recipes, this one included, begin airily with "boiled tripe" and give no hint of how long it takes. The curry powder is a period marker: ready-mixed curry powder was a familiar grocery item in the United States by the late nineteenth century, and turn-of-the-century cookbooks reached for it much as they reached for Worcestershire sauce, as a savoury lift for organ meats and leftovers rather than an attempt at Indian cooking. The tomato-and-onion base with a browned-flour thickening is the ordinary American brown stew of the period, applied to the cheapest thing in the shop.