The Combo Mother-in-Law rustled up one of her staple dishes for me. Tripe with Spanish beans, potatoes and tomatoes.
I can just about remember my father tucking in to a huge steaming bowl of tripa alla inglese, that being great leathery sheets of the stuff boiled for about nine weeks in milk and onions. Intending visitors could be seen running away from the house with a handkerchief pressed over their faces, dry heaving at the foul stink. Then there was my time in the abattoir where I got to know cows' (and pigs' and sheep's) stomachs rather too well, but that's for another day.This very Italian dish is a lot more delicate (not difficult), but I still have a problem, oops sorry, issue with the texture of tripe. It's not meat but it's not fat either its....hmm, offal in its purest form I suppose.
WH, this sounds like a dish for you. Do you ever cook tripe? Can one still buy it in Blighty?
10 comments:
People ate trip in 'the old days' because it was cheap...eg Lancashire mill workers, who first boiled the cr*p out of it, then doused it in vinegar to kill the taste.
Today, it should only be eaten by Dalmatians, Akitas and small rodents. And supporters of Blackburn Rovers.
Ron, thanks for reminding me of Dick Emery :)
Serves you right for coming to London and not telling me.
I wouldn't even feed my Tennessee Toe-Hound on that stuff!
We served it for free in my mums pub along with pigs feet.
Ah Ron - you're getting there - enlightenment eh ? Tripe at Diplo Hall is home grown and even better for it - yum yum.
I would rather eat my own entrails than eat tripe. Just the look of it turns my stomach for all the reasons in your article. The look, the smell, the texture - I feel quite queazy just thinking about it. In a wartime situation I would recommend people eat their pets before tackling tripe.
They queue for the stuff in Lancashire, but that's Lancastrians for you.
Mind you, they also sell it at the posh butchers in 'Hampstead of East London', Wanstead.
I once, in the 1970s, ordered a plate of tripe in a posh restaurant in Oxfordshire. I asked for it in a Mount Everest 'because it's there' exploratory kind of way, and I have to say it was a mistake. With kidneys and livers of all kinds I have no problem, and I'm happy if someone gives me tongue, if you see what I mean, but tripe? No thanks.
When my mother served it up to me one wet Monday morning in 1954 I seriously thought she'd cooked our communal bath flannel.
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