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Boiled Tripe, Onion Sauce

A dish of boiled tripe served with a sauce of onions, milk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Tripe, Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tripe

  1. Weigh and wash the tripe.

  2. Boil the tripe in water with skim milk for 5 minutes to whiten it.

  3. Simmer the tripe for about 1 hour and 15 minutes until well done.

Make the onion sauce

  1. Peel the onions.

  2. Boil the onions in salted water for 1 hour until tender.

  3. Chop the boiled onions finely.

  4. Mix the chopped onions with 1 pint of boiling milk thickened with flour, and season with salt and pepper.

  5. Simmer the onion sauce for 5 minutes.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + oniontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Is the main protein, and long simmering makes it tender enough to eat.
Onions
Sweeten as they cook and, once chopped, give the sauce its body and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the boiling milk so it clings to the onions as a sauce.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the onion sauce and adds richness and mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Simmering the onion sauce after mixing. Flour thickens only as the liquid simmers and its starch swells. Simmering too briefly leaves the sauce thin, while boiling too hard or too long can scorch the milk on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, 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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