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Tripe a-LA-Kilkenny

A stew of tripe and onions flavored with butter, flour, salt, and mustard, garnished with lemon or barberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tripe a-LA-Kilkenny

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the tripe into square pieces.

  2. Peel and wash the onions, then cut each into halves.

Cook

  1. Boil the onions in water until tender.

  2. Add the tripe to the boiling onions and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Pour off most of the liquid, then add a little flour, butter, salt, and mustard. Shake over the heat until the butter melts.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a dish and serve hot, garnished with lemon or barberries.

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 + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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

Double tripe
Provides the main body of the dish as the meat that becomes tender during simmering.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet as they boil, adding body and mild sweetness to the liquid.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid slightly, giving the sauce a light body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and smoothing the sauce as it melts.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the butter and tripe.

The step that matters

Adding the flour, butter and mustard after pouring off the liquid. Flour thickens only when it is distributed and heated with the remaining liquid, so shaking over heat until the butter melts helps prevent lumps and a floury taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, flour, butter, mustard. 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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