Let us consider, briefly and
with a fair amount of justified revulsion, the concept of tripe.
Put bluntly, tripe is the edible
portion of another animal’s stomach (said unlucky critter is generally a cow).
It’s similar in appearance to a fleshy grey honeycomb, or possibly a football.
It’s similar in texture to rubber, overcooked octopus, or the nightmares of Mr.
Fantastic. Most distinctly, it’s similar in smell to the last chamber of Hell
on chili con carne night, when Satan’s had one too many beers. It’s a cow’s stomach, to reiterate.
And, it’s wildly popular in
certain areas of the United States. The reason is probably the same as my
mother’s rationale for eating pickled herring and sour cream on Christmas Eve:
ancestral.
Frankly, tripe sucks, on a desirability
basis. It is, however, replete with protein. If you were, say, the peasant
farmer whose newly slaughtered cow had just been carved up, all the
recognizable muscles taken to the king, along with the thalamus (mmm
sweetbreads), the heart, the liver, the intestines (sausage casing, don’t
forget) and you were hungrily staring at a pile of bones, a few kidneys and the
stomach, hell yes you’re going to jump on some sweet stomach lovin’! At least
the stomach doesn’t smell like piss, right, kidneys?
So, with a broad stroke of the
brush and by playing fast and loose with facts in order to succinctly present
the truth, there you have the origin of tripe, and its enduring appeal. Now the
story gets personal and…painful.
Being an Italian chef in a
largely Italian town ten minutes away from my alma mater isn’t really such a
bad gig. Great food, decent people, good bars and college girls? Where can you
go wrong there? The answer will not surprise you: tripe.
My chef had had too many
requests for cow stomach near the holidays that year. He could ignore them no
longer, and he heroically sallied forth, heroically purchased a half pound of
the tough grey stuff for experimentative purposes, and heroically handed it to
me. “Poach this, slice it up and stick it in some marinara,” were his exact
words, I believe. What I heard was “Blah blah blah I hate you, have I told you
that lately?”
Never one to back away in the
face of adversity, I promptly called to my close friend and waiter, Dave.
“Dude. Smell this,” I said. He did. His face turned nearly the same color as
the bloodless offal on the silver table. “Would you eat that?”
“Man I wouldn’t even feed my mom
that, and I hate her,” he may have said. Frankly, I’ve forgotten, but it seems
like it’d be in character for him.
Ok. The stakes are high, but I
am a Man and therefore unafraid of raw cow stomach. I tossed it in a sauce pot,
covered it with water, salted it liberally and set that vile bit of tissue to boil.
Poaching is a process of bringing a cold material (in this case, the
tripe) to a rolling boil, then backing off the heat and allowing it to simmer
until fully cooked. This process is useful for cooking a lot of things:
chicken, eggs, fish fume. Usually one is aided in the process by indicators of
doneness. In a fume, for example, the fish parts (head, tail, skin etc. Fish
leavings. Cooking is gross, but pretty cool) will degrade considerably, flaking
off and leaving a deeply flavorful broth in their wake. Chicken turns white. An
egg turns solid.
The tripe did nothing. It boiled. Then it simmered. It simmered for a
full hour until customers began lodging their complaints at that godawful
smell, and, seeing no change in its basic appearance or structural integrity, I
called it done and shocked the hell out of it with cold water.
Next up: The slicing. Anyone who
knows me will corroborate this- I keep my knives wickedly sharp. You could
shave with my French. You could joint out a tree with my boning knife. Both
fouled on the football-esque surface of the tripe. It was time for drastic
measures.
Besides the graceful curving
form of the French knife, the most popular knife in the public’s idea of the
chef’s rack is the meat cleaver. It’s a big, ferocious, German looking hunk of
metal usually reserved for breaking bones (literally) and jointing large
animals. Like cows. I turned now to this unwieldy monstrosity, hoping to, well,
cleave through the stomach with sheer force.
It worked, after a fashion and I
managed to hack the tripe into strips, reminiscent of trippa alla romana, a Roman dish in which the tripe is simmered
with tomatoes and wine. The presence of those two particular ingredients would
have helped tremendously, in retrospect; both are highly acidic, obviously, and
would have served to soften the stomach tissue. Perhaps poaching had not been
the best course of action.
I was interrupted from my
reverie by Dave, appearing behind me. “Hey man, Theresa [a dear and valued
customer and, significantly, the chiropractor of choice for those of us who
stand for hours at a time] wants to know what smells like ass.”
“She actually said ‘ass?’”
“Well, no, obviously not. She
wanted to know what smelled like butt.”
Ah, Theresa.
“It’s the tripe.”
“Still? That shit’s been off the
stove for like half an hour!”
“I know, even the hood seems to
hate it!”
The smell lingered for several
hours more. The tripe was duly “tossed in some marinara,” my hands were washed,
oh, nine or ten times, and the awful offal was relegated to a dark corner of
the walk-in to macerate.
A week and a half later, it was
still there. And by then, it was hairy. There was a full blown penicillin farm
sprouting in a plastic tub sitting in my cooler. I mentioned this to the chef.
“Ah. Too bad, I guess. Toss it.”
This surprised me. Throwing food
out, otherwise known as “shrink,” is verboten in the restaurant industry.
Obviously, we don’t serve moldy food, but the fact that it got to that point
was odd enough. Tim is a man who eats anything- I’ve seen him eat moldy pasta,
rather than waste it- and I’d expected him to try it.
“There isn’t enough beer in the
world,” he later told me, “to get me to eat stomach. Or lung, for that matter.
But now we can say we tried.”
I pointed out that we could have
simply lied, said we’d tried without actually having done the thing.
“Aaron, we’re honest here.”
Long story short: You won’t ever
find tripe at Questa Lasagna in Mount Morris, New York. When the cooks won’t
even eat it, it manifestly isn’t meant to be eaten. Stick with steaks, if you
have a hankering for cow.
Please tip your server on the
way out.
Next up:
Vegans. Why chefs love them and cooks hate them.
