Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Tripe with Onion Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 with Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the tripe

  1. Weigh and wash the tripe thoroughly.

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

  3. Reduce heat and simmer the tripe for about 1 hour and 15 minutes until tender.

Cook and chop the onions

  1. Peel the onions and cook them in boiling water with a little salt for 1 hour until tender.

  2. Chop the boiled onions finely.

Make the onion sauce

  1. Thicken the boiling milk with flour, add the chopped onions, season with salt and pepper, and simmer 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
The main ingredient; long simmering softens its firm, chewy texture until tender.
Skim milk
Poached with the tripe to whiten it, giving a paler, cleaner appearance.
Onions
Provide sweetness and mild aroma, softening into the sauce as they cook.
Boiling milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that carries the onions.
Flour
Starch swells in the hot milk, thickening it into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Starch granules swell only when heated in liquid, so the flour must be fully dispersed and simmered to thicken the sauce evenly. Simmering also cooks out the raw, pasty taste of flour.

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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes