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Tripe and Onions

Tripe and Onions is a stew of blanched tripe and sliced onions simmered in milk and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Tripe and Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tripe and onions

  1. Place tripe in a saucepan with cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Discard the water after blanching the tripe.

  3. Cut the blanched tripe into neat oblong pieces.

  4. Peel and slice the onions.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Combine the tripe and onions with 2 cups of milk in a saucepan and let it simmer for 2 hours.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold milk to form a paste. Stir the flour paste into the hot milk slowly, allowing it to boil and thicken.

  3. Season the stew with salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Serve the stew very hot.

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. Onion + milktop 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
Provides the chewy, tender meat that forms the body of the stew.
Onions
Soften during simmering and add sweetness and aroma to the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the stew and gives it a mild, creamy richness.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk into a smoother, heavier sauce when mixed into a paste first.

The step that matters

Adding the flour paste to the hot milk. Flour mixed into a paste with cold milk and then stirred into hot liquid disperses evenly. Added dry or all at once, it clumps and leaves lumps that do not dissolve.

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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