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To Boil Tripe

A boiled tripe stew with onions, milk, cream, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Boil Tripe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tripe

  1. Wash the tripe well in warm water.

  2. Trim off all the fat from the tripe.

  3. Cut the tripe into small pieces.

  4. Boil the tripe in enough water to cover it for five hours.

  5. After four hours, pour off the water.

  6. Season the tripe with pepper and salt.

  7. Add equal parts milk and water to the tripe.

  8. Boil the tripe in the milk and water for one hour.

Make the onion sauce

  1. Boil the onions until soft.

  2. Drain and mash the onions.

  3. In a clean saucepan, combine the mashed onions with a bit of butter rolled in flour.

  4. Add a splash of cream or milk to the mixture.

  5. Let the mixture boil.

Serve

  1. Add the mixture to the tripe just before serving.

  2. Serve with pepper, vinegar, and mustard.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tripe
Forms the main body of the stew and becomes tender through long boiling.
Onions
Mashed and boiled soft, they add sweetness and body to the sauce.
Butter and flour
Cooked together, the flour thickens the sauce and the butter adds richness.
Milk
Simmered with the tripe, it adds mild richness and helps soften the meat.

The step that matters

Boiling the tripe for the full time. Tripe is tough and needs a long, gentle simmer to become tender. Stopping early or boiling too hard can leave it chewy or make it rubbery.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, milk, butter, flour, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, milk, butter, flour, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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