Tom and I can’t let any winter go by without having at least one dinner of tripe. Not many of the friends with whom we regularly dine back and forth can match our fondness for that humble and, admittedly, bizarre cut of beef, so we never force them to meet it at our dinner table. Tant pis for them, we say to ourselves.
Hence, when Tom came home from the butcher’s one day recently with three pounds of honeycomb tripe – looking very like the cow’s stomach that it is – we knew it was ours alone to enjoy.
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When it comes to tripe and other innard dishes, you just have to relax your aesthetic standards.
I have several good, reliable recipes for tripe. I’ve written posts about some of them in past years, e.g., here and here. But since my plan for this blog in 2020 is to focus on previously untried recipes from my current cookbook collection, here was a good opportunity to find something different to do with the tripe.
After checking many of my books, I found a recipe I hadn’t made before in Marcella Hazan’s More Classic Italian Cooking. (I know she later combined her two “classic” volumes into one, but I have the original two.) It wasn’t very different from a recipe of hers called Trippa alla Parmigiana that I knew from the first volume but this one, Trippa e Fagiole, she says is particularly favored in the bean-loving regions of Tuscany and Veneto.
While the two recipes have almost identical ingredients, there are variations in proportions and handling that made me curious. Over the years, I’ve encountered several instances of two Italian recipes that looked much the same but came out quite unlike each other. And this new one of course had beans, which the earlier one didn’t. Definitely worth a try – especially since, for us, a winter without beans is as unthinkable as a winter without tripe.
The first step in the new recipe was to precook 2 pounds of tripe for 20 minutes in boiling water with a carrot, a celery stalk, and an onion. The vegetables were then to be discarded, which seemed like a waste to me: How much could they contribute in so little time? But since I had three pounds of tripe on hand and needed only one pound for the half-recipe amount I’d be making, I precooked it all as directed and put two-thirds away in the freezer. Thus cannily getting triple value from the vegetables. Hah!
Once drained and cooled, my tripe had to be cut into ¼-inch wide strips of any desired length – a little different from the other recipe’s specific size requirements, though the quantity of tripe was the same in both. Tom did the cutting for me with his usual aplomb. He also very finely chopped ⅓ cup each of fresh carrot, celery, and onion, and cut up a big garlic clove. Again, some differences in cut size and quantity from the other recipe.
The onions sautéed briefly in butter and olive oil before the carrot, celery, garlic, rosemary, and parsley joined them to cook for a few more minutes. (Why the onions alone first? I don’t know. They were supposed to turn “faintly golden,” but mine never do. I’m sure all the vegetables could have gone in at once with no harm.)
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Then came the tripe. I tossed everything together so the tripe was well coated with the oil and vegetables, raised the heat, stirred in ½ cup of white wine, and cooked until the liquid had evaporated.
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The last things to add were salt, pepper, 1½ cups of chopped canned plum tomatoes with their juices, and a cup of good homemade meat-and-vegetable broth.
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The covered pot went into a 350° oven for about 3 hours. Checking from time to time, I found it needed a little hot water toward the end to keep the tripe moist. All told, this dish had more wine and less tomato than the first-volume recipe had.
Perhaps you’re now wondering what happened to the beans? Their moment is coming.
In the morning, I’d soaked and cooked ¾ pound of dried white beans in plain water and set them aside. When the tripe was done and out of the oven, the drained beans went into the pot, which got a final simmering of 10 minutes on a stove burner.
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At serving time, I stirred ½ cup of freshly grated parmigiano cheese into the tripe and beans. (The other recipe wanted ¾ cup).
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Well, it was delicious tripe. We thoroughly enjoyed it. And the beans had taken on a remarkable amount of flavor from their brief fling with the other ingredients. But after all my meticulously noting of the subtle differences between the two recipes, I have to say this tripe dish was remarkably like its predecessor.
A suspicious person might wonder if Hazan had varied the details deliberately, to make a standard preparation seem something distinctive and create a “new” recipe for her second book. Or, more charitably, we might say the comparison goes to show how a good, sturdy, traditional recipe can provide opportunities for a lot of leeway in its execution. A useful thing for any cook to remember!
lovely post and recipe, Diane.
I love tripe but it is virtually impossible to get it here in London, even if one is lucky enough to be living near excellent butchers. The Brits lost any taste for it, in fact for most offal. It goes into dog’s food – sad, very sad.
I managed to find something last year, from Chinatown, but it was not good because it had been blanched to death.
It is odd that in an age where there is so much talking about not wasting food and nose to tail meat eating, tripe (and in general offal) is still a big NO for most people. I was after some kidneys few days ago and my butcher said that it had to be ordered.
I have never boiled tripe first, because in Italy it is generally sold already half cooked. When I was living in Milano, where there was a strong tripe eating tradition, my excellent butcher would have different types of tripe available, ranging from white to off-cream colour, each tract of the intestine with a different texture. Lovely.
The tripe Hazan calls trippa e fagioli is also very typical of Milanese cooking, using giant white beans.
thanks for sharing, ciao, stefano
Yes, even at the best butchers here in NYC the only tripe obtainable is the honeycomb, so the other three cow stomachs must go into dogfood too. And gras double is so good! Similarly, while we can get a fresh veal kidney or two by special order, lovely lamb kidneys come only in frozen five-pound batches. Sigh.
I was unable to eat tripe until relatively recently – about ten years ago, something like that? The very thought appalled me. So that is why, caro Stefano, I presume so many people shy away from it in the UK and elsewhere – because they are not brought up to eat it and think it a ‘normal’ food stuff. My grandmother used to feed me fried lambs’ brains as a child. That was okay. However, the roasted head of lamb in the oven has always been a no-no for me and always will be, with eyes staring at you, ugh. We are silly, squeamish people. I tried the lampredotto sandwich in Florence and liked it very much. But I still love the Roman tripe the best, with freshly grated pecorino and a hint of mint. Regarding the onion first, Diane … is it because an onion takes longer to cook than the other ingredients? That would explain it.
About the onion, Jo: No, I don’t think so. Onion, carrot, celery, garlic — all those things go into a normal soffrito together even for shorter cooking times, and here they all had three whole hours.
How I miss New York City when I read about the availability of ingredients like tripe. Here in this wilderness, San Diego, even a veal chop is near impossible to find. Ordering what’s deemed to be a specialty cut like bone-in lamb shoulder requires a two-week pre order. The tripe looks delicious.
You have my sympathy, Roland. Some years back, when Tom and I were last in California — in Santa Cruz, I think it was — the only restaurant we could find that offered lamb refused to serve it rare — not even medium-rare. The owner-chef insisted that all the pink has to be cooked out of lamb or it won’t be any good.
We had tripe about once per week in the UK during the war as it was so cheap and it was boiled first in water and vinegar, then added to vegetables.
Now it is difficult to buy and needs to be ordered as with veal.
Italy and Poland have the best tripe recipes and I am now going to revisit tripe baked with tomatoes.