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To Boil Tripe

A dish of boiled tripe served with boiling water, onions, and optionally stewed in milk thickened with arrowroot or flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 and simmer

  1. Cut the tripe into moderately sized pieces.

  2. Place the tripe in a pot and cover with water.

  3. Simmer the tripe slowly for 6-12 hours, depending on its age, until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the tripe in a hash dish with some of the boiling water and boiled onions.

Milk variation

  1. For a tasty variation, remove the tripe from the water and stew it in a saucepan with milk.

  2. Thicken the milk with arrowroot or a mixture of flour and butter, and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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. Onion + arrowroottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Arrowroot + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together329 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Tripe
Long, slow simmering softens its connective tissue, making the main meat tender.
Onions
Boiling mellows their sharpness and adds a mild, sweet flavour to the dish.
Milk
Forms the base of the creamy variation sauce that the tripe is stewed in.
Arrowroot or flour
Starch swells in the hot milk and thickens it into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and combines with flour to form a thickening base.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly, not at a rolling boil. Vigorous boiling toughens the muscle proteins and makes tripe rubbery. Gentle heat over many hours slowly breaks down connective tissue, so the tripe becomes tender throughout.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk, butter, pepper. 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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