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An Easy Way to Cook Tripe

Tripe cooked in a sauce of onion, fat, nutmeg, parsley, capers, saffron, and vinegar, served with mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

An Easy Way to Cook Tripe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tripe

  1. Boil the cleaned tripe in a saucepan with thin flour and water to maintain its color, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  2. Drain the cooked tripe and slice it.

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the sliced onion in a little fat in a stew pan, adding salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg.

  2. Add ½ cup of the reserved boiling water and let it cook for 30 minutes.

  3. Mix chopped parsley, capers, flour, dried saffron, and vinegar in a bowl.

  4. Combine the sauce with the sliced tripe and serve with mashed potatoes.

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. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + saffrontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Capers + saffrontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Tripe
Is the main body of the dish, becoming tender through long simmering.
Onion
Softens and sweetens in the fat, forming the flavour base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it binds with the liquid.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Boil the tripe with thin flour and water. Tripe is dense and needs long, gentle simmering to become tender. Keeping the water lightly floured helps the tripe stay pale, as the record intends.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, nutmeg, parsley, capers, flour, saffron, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, nutmeg, parsley, capers, flour, saffron, vinegar. 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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