Secret Ingredients (16 page)

THE TROUBLE WITH TRIPE

M.F.K. FISHER

T
he main trouble with tripe is that in my present dwelling place, a small town in northern California, I can count on one hand the people who will eat it with me. What is more, its careful, slow preparation is not something I feel like doing for a meal by myself at this stage of the game, or for several meals. It is one of the things that call for a big pot and plenty of hungry people. Not even my children really like it, although studiously conditioned reflexes forced them to taste it in various guises and countries and to give fair judgment, which in their case was No. Friends tell me that they hate tripe because they, in turn, were forced to eat it when young, or saw too much of it in fraternity boardinghouses as an “economy meat”—reasons like that. I myself could claim a childhood trauma if I needed to, and I admit that I did not face a dish of tripe from my grandmother’s death until I was a good decade beyond it. In modern lingo, tripewise I lay fallow. The old lady, gastronomical dictator appointed by her own vision of righteous Christian living, a nervous stomach, and the fact that she more than generously shared the expenses of our exploding household, for some reason approved of eating the inner linings of an ox’s first and second bellies.

In
Larousse Gastronomique,
where tripe is discussed under “Offal” in the English edition, there is news for Grandmother. (She would dismiss it as foreign nonsense, of course.) “Rich in gelatine, tripe needs prolonged cooking,” says the culinary scripture, “and is not easy to digest, so that it has no place in the diet of the dyspeptic [or] sufferers from gout.” I sense that my beldame was practicing upon herself and us a kind of sympathetic medicine, to request that tripe be prepared and served—to be brave, eat a lion’s heart; to remain shy and timid, eat violets in a salad; and so on. Oxen are reputedly serene and docile, and she had a digestive system that ranked her among the leaders in Battle Creek’s regular army of dyspeptic missionaries and would have honored her with a front seat at any late-Victorian spa in farther waters, like Vichy or Baden-Baden. The reasoning, perhaps: since an ox has not one but two pieces of equipment for his continuous ruminative consumption of the grains and grasses known also to be salubrious for man, why would partaking of some of his actual stomachs not help Mrs. Holbrook’s own unhappy organ?

My grandmother unwittingly enjoyed perfect digestion, thanks to her constant attention to it, and it was no more than her due reward if she believed that her hypersensitive innards would and could assimilate this delicate honeycomb of animal muscle, with gastric gratitude if not pleasure. She did not believe in the latter, anyway, as part of a true and upright life, and as for the hinted danger of gout, only gentlemen had that in her days of rigid divisions of the sexual hazards of existence.

There was only one way to serve tripe fit to eat when I was little—that is, fit for Grandmother to eat. It was seldom prepared when my mother was feeling fit enough herself to maintain some control over the menus, but when she was low in our private pecking order we ate it fairly often. My father, quietly and successfully determined to remain cock of the roost with dignity, always found it commendable, or at least edible. The recipe for it, if I feel sturdy enough to give it in correct form, would start with boiling the rubbery reticulum in pieces, draining it casually, and dousing it with something called White Sauce, which was and will remain in the same class as my grandmother’s flour-thickened Boiled Dressing. The dish was at best a faintly odorous and watery challenge to one’s innate sense of the fitness of things.

I recognize that such experiences can lead to cynicism, or the analyst’s couch. In my own case, they seem mainly to have stiffened my wish to prove them mistaken, and I am now a happy, if occasionally frustrated, tripe eater.

I had a good beginning, the second time around (really a kind of ghost-laying), at Crespin in Dijon. The small restaurant is gone now, but for a long time it served some of the simplest and lustiest meals I have ever eaten, especially on market days, for the wine people who came in from all that part of Burgundy to talk about casks, corks, sulfates. There were always snails at Crespin, of course, except in very hot weather, and in the cool months oysters out on the sidewalk in kelpy baskets, and both downed by the dozens. There was the classic green salad to scour the maw, and a good plain tart of seasonal fruits if one could still face it. I remember some cheeses in the winter. And then there were sealed casseroles of
tripes à la mode de Caen véritable.

Those casseroles, for two or six or eight people, seemed to possess the inexpressible cachet of a numbered duck at the Tour d’Argent, or a small perfect octahedral diamond from Kimberley. They were unsealed at the table. The vapor hissed out, and the whole dish seethed. Plates were too hot to touch bare-handed, to keep the sauce from turning as gluey as a good ox would need it to be at a temperature more suited to his own digestion. It was served with soup spoons as well as knives and forks, and plenty of crusty bread lay alongside. It was a fine experience.

Crespin, with its hoary, monstrous old oyster opener always there on the wintry sidewalk, his hands the most scarred I have ever seen and still perhaps the surest in the way they handled the Portugaises, the green Marennes, upon their dank beds of fresh seaweed—Crespin and the old man and even the ruddy marketers are gone, except on my own mind’s palate.

The last time I went there, I was alone. It was a strange feeling at first. I was in Dijon late in the 1950s, to go again to the Foire Gastronomique. The town was jumping, quasi-hysterical, injected with a mysterious supercharge of medieval pomp and Madison Avenue–via-Paris commercialism. I went to several banquets, where ornate symbols were pinned and bestowed, with dignitaries several levels above me in the ferocious protocol of eating and drinking, and then I went by myself to the restaurant I wanted to be in once more.

In the small low room there was a great hum and fume, like market day but even better, and every table but one was occupied by large, red-faced, loud, happy Burgundians.
My
table was empty, and it seemed indicated by the gods that I should come to sit at it. I had sat there many times before. It was a little apart, though not obtrusively so, up a step like the fantastic banquet boards still cluttered and heavy at the official feastings, and pleasantly enclosed on three sides, with the white window curtains at my back. If I had not come, a potted plant would have been set neatly in my place, I know. I felt pleased to be there instead, and as usual I was awed by my continuing good luck in life, especially now and then.

I think I ate a few snails, to stay in the picture. (The old scarred oysterman was not there, it being early November and very warm.) Then, although after all the banquets I felt about as hungry as a sated moth, I ordered a small and ritual casserole of
tripes.
They were as good as they had ever been some decades or centuries ago on my private calendar. They hissed and sizzled with delicate authority. Nobody paid any attention to my introspective and alcoved sensuality, and the general noise beat with provincial lustiness in the packed room. An accordionist I had last seen in Marseille slid in from the frenzied streets and added to the wildness, somewhat hopelessly. When he saw me digging into my little pot of tripe, he nodded, recognizing me as a fellow wanderer. I asked him if he would have a drink, as he twiddled out near-logical tunes on the instrument he wore like a child on his belly. He looked full at me and said, “Sometime a
pastis
on the Old Port.” I have not yet met him there again, but it is almost doubtless that I shall.

I could not know that the next time I returned, lemminglike, to the dank old town, Crespin and the white curtains and all of it would be gone, but it is. It is too bad to explain.

The classic recipes for preparing tripe can be found in any good cookbook, which someone who has read this far will already know and be able to consult. I like the French methods, but there are excellent ones in almost every culture that permit the use of this type of animal meat. Here is a good one that is fresh to the taste, adapted from the
trippa alla Petronius
served currently in a London restaurant called Tiberio:

Drain tripe and cut into 1-inch squares. Gently brown the three vegetables in the butter. Add tomato purée and wine, and stir until sauce thickens. Add tripe, and simmer slowly for 1 hour.

In separate skillet warm olive oil, and add garlic, parsley, and basil, taking care not to overheat. Cook slowly about 5 minutes, mix quickly into tripe, and serve.

This is a comparatively fast recipe (the true
tripes à la mode de Caen
take at least twelve hours of baking), and it is very simple, which explains why it is sought after in a posh Mayfair restaurant, where the clients may feel jaded. I think that the fresh herbs give it its special quality, but perhaps it could be successfully tinkered with if they proved unprocurable. Fortunately, this is seldom the case with parsley. If dried basil had to be used, one to two tablespoonfuls should be soaked in one and a half instead of one glass of wine, and I would be tempted to go a step further and use a light dry red instead of the Tiberio’s white. All this would, I fear, make the whole dish more ordinary.

While I am about it, I might as well discuss why it is much easier to make things with tripe now than it was a hundred or so years ago, or when I myself was little. I do this in a missionary spirit, convinced that they can be very good to eat and should be less shunned in our country. In these days, tripe is almost always taken through its first tedious cleansings in special rooms at the wholesale butchers’ factories. My friend Remo, meatman and mentor, says somewhat cryptically that the stuff is subjected to enormous pressure, which I assume means with steam. It is then trimmed to a uniform niceness, wrapped in bundles rather like large pallid grape leaves, and delivered fresh or quick-frozen to the markets where there is any demand for it.

Once the cook takes over from the butcher, this modern treatment makes it possible to prepare tripe for any dish in an hour or a little more, by washing it well and then simmering it in ample water flavored to taste with carrots, onion, celery, herbs. When tender but not too soft, it is drained—and then
avanti, en avant,
forward!

Here is the method, perhaps to shame some of us into trying our luck for a change, recommended in 1868 by the expatriate Pierre Blot, in his
Hand-Book of Practical Cookery, for Ladies and Professional Cooks. Containing the Whole Science and Art of Preparing Human Food
(D. Appleton & Co., New York):

TRIPE

How to clean and prepare.
Scrape and wash it well several times in boiling water, changing the water every time, then put in very cold water for about twelve hours, changing the water two or three times; place it in a pan, cover it with cold water; season with parsley, chives, onions, one or two cloves of garlic, cloves, salt, and pepper; boil gently five hours, take out and drain.

When I was a child, I felt a somewhat macabre interest in watching our cook go through this old routine. It started in a washtub, with much sloshing with big scrub brushes and whackings at the slippery, ivory-white rubber. Then I am sure that baking soda was put into a couple of the several changes of water, making things foam in an evil way—I suppose a battle with some of the digestive juices my grandmother counted on? For the last cool soaking, handfuls of salt were thrown in, or so it now seems to me. But I am downright sure that in our house there was no fancy nonsense of herbs and suchlike in the final slow boiling. Plain fare with a good White Sauce, that is what we were served. “Eat what’s set before you, and be thankful for it!” was the gastronomical motto that quivered always in the air above our table while Grandmother sat there, and with a certain amount of philosophical acceptance it can be a good one, the whole chancy way.