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Chitterlings or Calf's Tripe

A boiled calf tripe dish served with stewed onions and buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chitterlings or Calf's Tripe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the chitterlings and cut them into pieces.

  2. Place them in a stew-pan with salt, pepper, and 2 quarts of water.

  3. Boil for 2 hours or until tender.

Make the onions

  1. Peel the onions and boil them in plenty of water until soft.

  2. Drain the onions and mash them.

  3. In a cleaned sauce-pan, combine the mashed onions, butter, cream or milk, nutmeg, and a little salt. Sprinkle in some flour, cover, and heat until it boils.

Serve

  1. Once the chitterlings are tender, drain them.

  2. Place buttered toast in a dish, lay the chitterlings on top, and serve with stewed onions.

  3. Season with pepper and vinegar before serving.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Chitterlings
Main protein; boiling until tender turns the tough tissue soft enough to eat.
White onions
Mashed and stewed, they provide sweetness and a soft, creamy body to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the onion mixture a smooth, rounded flavor.
Cream or rich milk
Adds moisture and richness, helping the mashed onions become smooth and creamy.
Flour
Thickens the onion mixture as it heats, giving it body rather than a watery texture.

The step that matters

Heat the onion mixture after adding flour. Flour must be heated until it boils to cook out its raw starch taste and to thicken the mixture properly; stopping early leaves the sauce pasty and floury.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, cream, nutmeg, flour. 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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