Category: Dear Dad

My mother’s 80th birthday was Friday and I was at a loss for what I could do? It’s not that my mother has everything, but she is not really a person who wants or needs more junk in her stage of life… just positive experiences.

As a child of the great depression ( not to be confused with what we are going through today), my mother worked on a farm and the family she lived with loved what Alfred Hitchcock referred to as ‘innards.’  One of the dishes my mother desired was tripe and she had a particular notion as to how it was to be prepared.

Tripe has been prepared forever and great exclamations to its wonders can be traced back to at least ancient Greece! There was even a special process to prepare it that was only lost in the last century, but I found it. In olden times, tripe was placed into an earthen pot and the lid was hermetically sealed with strategically placed bread dough… then it was slowly cooked for a period of 12 to 18 hours. When the lid was finally opened they said the smell was like ambrosia.

I thought that a pressure cooker would be a modern day solution to the clay pot and it worked brilliantly.

Tripe is also supposed to be best in the fall where cattle have changed their feeding habits to fallen apples. I suspect that this is the reason for the addition of Calvados (apple brandy) and many times recipes call for the tripe to be cooked in apple cider. There are a few sacred rules I broke in order to follow a suggestion from the ‘Epicurean’… such as making a tomato based sauce to pour over the cooked tripe.

How did it taste? In my trial run with a piece of tripe alone… I opened the cooker… and it smelled like… hmmm… hot dogs! Well, in the final effort with the infusion of the right sorts of fats, vegetables, wines and spirits… it tasted like a tender piece of beef! The kind of beef that the French say can be eaten with ‘wooden teeth’ ( it melts in your mouth).

So, try it yourself… or just enjoy a hot dog!

Roger

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