Tripe Tribulations

                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.