by Cathy Erway
Literally the lining of an animal’s stomach, tripe is one of those cuts categorized as offal. These include kidney, heart, liver, brain, ears—the entrails and organs from a butchered animal aside from the fleshy, meaty cuts. These are generally considered less delectable than meat, although for any one of these cuts, you’re bound to find aficionados for it in some part of the world, or some beloved dish that features it. Offal has traditionally been reserved for the poor; hence, it is cheap, but people have been finding ways to make it more palatable across the world, in some cases turning them into delicacies, such as headcheese (made from simmering a pig’s head and coagulating the pieces into a sliceable block), foie gras (the fattened liver of a goose), fried sweetbreads (the thymus gland), or braised chicken feet, another one of my dim sum favorites. The offerings go on. Tripe is usually chopped, then simmered, stewed, or steamed until it becomes very tender and has soaked in plenty of flavor, as its rubbery-textured though fairly tasteless character is hard to swallow for many.
My experience with tripe before this had been limited to Chinese food; either served cold and gently seasoned, or in a warm five-spice stew, it was usually on the table at dim sum brunches I attended when I was growing up. I knew that tripe was almost unheard-of in American cooking, and I would learn over the years that its texture was particularly off-putting to my peers. It’s true that its blubbery mouthfeel and rippling, weblike surface are uniquely weird, especially at the first sight or taste.
Most meat purchased by Americans today has been stripped of any traces of the animal it once was—reduced to trimmed, boned, and often skinned cuts of white meat, or ground meat patties. It often comes to grocery stores as chunks of ready-to-cook stew meat or stir-fry strips, no slicing necessary. I’ve found that many people are horrified or offended by the sight of raw meat with telltale signs of the animal it came from, such as a quail with its feet still attached that I once cooked for friends, or a whole fish cooked and served with its head still intact. As a culture, we’ve strayed pretty far from having to acknowledge what meat actually looks like before it’s prepared, so their shock is understandable.
I personally share the opinion of many advocates who say that if an individual chooses to eat animals, he or she should be willing to confront their death face-to-face by taking part in their slaughter, if only once—just so that we’re more mindful of what it takes to put meat on a plate. Well, I hadn’t witnessed an animal slaughter (unless you counted boiling those lobsters, cooking live shellfish, such as clams, or just catching fish). But I agree with the premise of facing what you’re going to eat, even at the unpleasant necessary stages of rawness. I’ll further that by arguing that if an individual enjoys eating tripe, headcheese, or another type of offal, he or she should be willing to cook it—and that often means encountering meat at its unsightliest.
The next day, after confirming Aaron, Mai, and Jordan for the menudo brunch, I called my parents to ask them how to say tripe in Chinese. Sensing that Chinatown was the easiest place to find a butcher to purchase the cut from, I thought it would be helpful to know. On the phone, my mom got distracted and started asking me life questions. By the end of our conversation, I still had no idea how to say tripe in Chinese, as she insisted she had forgotten. She must have told my dad about my tripe-cooking plans, though, because I got an e-mail from him the next day.
“Nyo dza,” he wrote. “I think that’s the name of the beef tripe at dim sum with the turnips and Chinese spices. Or else the other, smaller kind of tripe that mom likes, but I don’t.” Then, thinking that I was planning on making one of these delicacies, he offered to look up recipes in some of his old Chinese cookbooks.
“I think there’s one in Pei Mei’s,” he wrote, referring to the brightly colored, circa-1960s cookbook with the prim woman in a traditional high-collar dress smiling on the back flap.
I wrote back, explaining the menudo dish and the recipe from Mike’s grandmother-in-law, tactfully leaving out the part about the controlled hangover experiment. My dad replied with a by-the-way warning: “Once or twice, I have eaten tripe that tasted yucky. I do not know if this has to do with the stomach acid from the inside of the animal left over. You will want to wash it thoroughly, and probably, it needs to be soaked in a chemical opposite of acid for a period of time before it can be used, but I don’t know what.”
Great. I would have to keep this in mind, though throughout my own, fewer years of eating tripe, I had never experienced an off taste.
I crashed my bike the week before the menudo brunch. I was riding home from a dinner party at Kara’s, and it began to rain as soon as I got on my bike. When I was only a few blocks from home, I got too close to a curb and scraped my front wheel against it. In a combination of the slippery conditions and my carelessness, I toppled sideways onto the sidewalk, kissing the pavement pretty hard. While the bike and my right hand caught most of the fall, I busted up the inside of my lip pretty badly and sprouted a nasty purple bruise on my chin the next morning that lasted a week and a half.
Matt injured himself that week as well. While apartment sitting for his friend (who was in the hospital with a broken ankle after a driver had clipped her on her bike), Matt was attacked by her cat. The cat’s deep claw puncture struck a vein in his wrist, which became infected and swelled up to the point where he could barely walk without the slight movements of his arm causing him pain.
That Friday night, before Mai’s birthday party, I went to Matt’s after work to make him dinner since it pained him to cook. I brought some salad greens, apple, gorgonzola cheese, and a crusty baguette for a light dinner on his rooftop. I tossed up the salad, and we sat and watched the sun drop and the sky fill with a dusty purplish hue, set off by the Manhattan skyline. A short while later, Jordan, Karol, and a few other friends joined us, and together we spent a long night celebrating no particular occasion.
The next day, both Jordan and I were hungover and moving at an excessively slow pace. It started raining that afternoon, and by the time I got out of the subway that evening to go to Mai’s party, there was a furious rainstorm. I got lost trying to find the building and ended up soaking wet even though I’d been holding an umbrella the whole time. The rain was so fierce, and coming at me from all directions, that I took every chance to duck into an alcove or underneath an awning, shivering in my thin long-sleeved shirt. When I finally arrived at the party, my clothes were dripping, my hair was matted to my face, my glasses were fogged from the stuffiness indoors, my chin was yellowish purple, and I had a preexisting hangover.
“Hey, are you ready to get hammered?” Aaron greeted me from across the room.
I couldn’t actually step over to him to say hi, as it was too cramped in the small apartment to get by. I smiled wanly. On a round table, an array of sushi-stuffing ingredients was set beside a bowl of sushi rice and squares of nori seaweed wrappers for make-it yourself maki rolls. On the kitchen counter a couple of bottles of hard alcohol accompanied some juices, soda, and a blender half filled with orangish slush. Just what I needed for a second hangover, I thought.
As it turned out, cocktails were just what I needed to lift my body from the hard knocks it had taken. There’s something to be said for the old hair-of-the-dog hangover remedy that stipulated a bit of alcohol the day after drinking. This either reversed the effects of the hangover or temporarily prolonged it—I wasn’t sure which. But I got my hair of the dog, in the form of a mango-and-pineapple-juice mixed drink, and went on to seconds with beer. I devoured plenty of sushi hand rolls, too, taking sheets of nori and wrapping rice, cucumbers, smoked salmon, tuna salad, and other tidbits in them.
“That’s what I’m going to do for my next party,” Jordan said, pointing at the sushi-making spread as she chomped down on a roll.
“Yeah, what a good idea,” I told Mai.
She shrugged modestly. “It’s not a lot of very special ingredients, just basic.”
Aaron came by and gave Mai a little squeeze.
“So,
are we ready for tomorrow?” he asked me. “I can’t wait to try out this spicy Mexican legend.”
“Yeah ... it should be interesting,” I said.
Earlier that day, I’d managed to make a trip to Chinatown to pick up the honeycomb beef tripe. It was next door to the seafood market where I’d picked up the lobsters, and once again I found myself toting a very strange object with me on the subway ride back to Brooklyn. This time, even though nothing was live and kicking, it felt about ten times weirder. Never had I seen honeycomb tripe in its raw, unprepared state before. I knew I’d be able to point it out the moment I saw it at a butcher shop. That flabby, honeycomblike texture was impossible to miss. So when I strolled to the end of the case of meats on display at the shop, I immediately spotted my prey. Whitish in color, somewhat translucent in parts, the floppy, baggy, deeply scored intestinal sacks were heaped one on top of another, like deflated monster-truck tires. On the meat shelf, the honeycomb pattern was a tight-knit lattice. But once the butcher lifted one up to take it out of the case, the rubbery flesh stretched out to reveal a gaping three-dimensional surface and a balloonlike shape with a wide O-shaped opening at one end. The intestines needed to be sold whole; unlike the neat cuts of flank steak or the individual trotters in the meat case, there was no trimming them down to certain weights. One had to eyeball these pieces for size and choose accordingly. I needed just one pound of tripe for the recipe Mike gave me, but looking at the bloated, watery texture of the offal, I had no idea what kind of weight it might carry. I got the butcher’s attention and ordered what looked to be the smallest of the tripe pieces.
He had given me a curious grin when I pointed to the tripe. He’d pointed to it with a smile as if to ask, “You really want this?” He seemed amused all the while as he wrapped and weighed the product. The meter read that it weighed approximately 1.6 pounds. At $1.69 per pound, this was an overhaul I could afford. Plus, I wanted to make plenty of menudo for my brunch guests, enough for seconds.
As I told the story of purchasing the tripe to Aaron, trying to describe the actual, physical appearance of the stuff, an uneasy feeling crept into my stomach.
“So, wait, tripe is actually a cow’s stomach? Did I hear that right?” Aaron said.
“Yeah. There’s lots of different stomachs in a cow—seven to be exact. So that’s just one of the kinds, with the honeycomb texture,” I said.
“Huh,” he said. “For some reason, I just thought tripe was a type of fish.”
“What?” I said.
“Oh, no,” said Jordan.
“No, I mean—I’ll eat it,” Aaron quickly responded. “I don’t know what made me think that, though. Weird.”
“Maybe you were thinking of ... trout?” Jordan offered.
“I have no idea.” Aaron shook his head. “Okay, so, yeah, hooray for tripe! Let’s all get wasted and eat it tomorrow.” We shared a toast.
“Did you cook it yet?” Mai asked.
“Partially,” I told her. I had cut the tripe into one- to two-inch squares and brought them to a boil with the onion and chili powder, following the recipe. I was planning to cook it the hour or so more it needed the next day, then would add the hominy, so that it would be piping hot and ready to serve when my friends arrived. (By then, of course, we’d decided against having a sleepover at someone’s place the night before.)
At the party, we met a few of Mai and Aaron’s other friends. Once my social powers were somewhat restored from the drinks, we even decided to tackle a board game. Board games, card games, and any type of game in general were a signature of Aaron’s from as far back as I could remember. In his closet there was a game called Guesstures. The concept of the game was similar to that of charades; each player drew a card and acted out the meaning of the word on it without saying a word.
“It’s like charades in a box.” Aaron shrugged. “It’s like paying for it instead of not.”
It turned out to be the perfect game for our group; out of the guests Mai had invited, several of them had limited English-speaking skills, and we were having trouble making conversation with them. But they all readily understood written English.
Jordan, myself, and two of Mai’s friends named Nao and Ho ended up playing for hours. The rounds were quick and simple, and it was funny to see the way people struggled and eventually interpreted ordinary words. I was on the floor laughing when Nao did his impression of hail, as I was also, when I tried to mime slug. After a few rounds, it was clear that Jordan and I were tuned into each other’s way of thinking and body language a lot more than either of us had expected. We nailed more correct answers than anyone else, one of us usually shouting out the word correctly within a few seconds of the other performing it. But Nao and Ho were pretty good at “Guessturing” too, and we didn’t stop until most of the other guests had filtered out of the party.
“We know each other so well,” I sobbed after nabbing a word Jordan was miming that had us all stumped for a few minutes.
At some point after midnight, Mai put out a wedge of Brie and crackers that she had forgotten about earlier. I naturally gorged myself on this as the night continued.
The next morning, I found myself with a classic hangover. Remembering the Brie and all those nori seaweed wrappers mixing in my stomach gave me a bad taste in my mouth and a want-to-wretch dread in the pit of my stomach. Plus, with all the different drinks around, I had forgotten to obey the golden rule of hangover prevention: Drink lots of water before sleeping. Now only the menudo could save me.
I pulled myself out of bed at ten in the morning, groggy and nauseous. I was grateful I didn’t have to touch or chop the tripe as I removed the covered stockpot from my fridge. I made the mistake of opening the lid right then and peeking inside, though. All the fat, which was stained bright orange from the chili powder, had entirely sealed the surface of the concoction, and after prodding it with a spoon in an attempt to skim some of it off, I realized that the soup’s liquid had turned into jelly.
I’d picked up another funky ingredient on my Chinatown trip. At the butcher shop, I’d decided that the soup base in the menudo could benefit from some pork bones, to mingle with the vegetables for a richly flavored broth (and to flavor the tripe as much as possible). But I didn’t see any bones in the cases, so without giving it much thought, I’d asked for a trotter—essentially the foot of the pig—instead. Once home, I took all my ingredients out and put them on the counter. The light pink, thick-skinned trotter definitely looked like the same limb that a living pig would stand on, except that roughly half a foot above the hoof, it had been sliced clean through the calf bone, revealing a circle of pink, red, and white swirls of bone and tissue at one end. I’d sunk the trotter into the center of the stockpot. The menudo squares, vegetables, garlic, chili powder, and cumin were already bubbling away. The trotter was too tall to be fully submerged, so I gave it a turn upside down, so that the hooved end was sticking a bit outside of the soup.
I would later discover that what I’d really made that morning was a spicy, tripe-studded aspic. A key ingredient in headcheese and other chunky terrines, aspic is a clear jelly that’s made from the natural gelatins in meat when it’s boiled and flavored with other ingredients. Pig’s trotters were a particularly common ingredient for making this substance, since the cartilage turns stock into jelly once they’re melted down and then chilled.
I let the mixture warm up again on the stove, hoping that it wouldn’t taste as bad as it looked. In the meantime, I preheated a Dutch oven for a loaf of no-knead bread that I’d let sit out the night before. Once the menudo was heated through again, I was glad that the jelly texture had broken, and the clear, reddish liquid was now bubbling. I lowered the heat to a low simmer and hopped in the shower to ready myself for my guests.
The kitchen had taken on a deeply savory aroma by the time I got out. It was marked by piquant and spicy red chili powder, which I’d bought at a specialty Mexican grocery, since the recipe called for pouring in a whole cupful. It didn’t
smell recognizably like pork, or trotter, or tripe. But it smelled pretty good. For the first time, I was actually looking forward to tasting the crazy combination of substances I had thrown into that pot. Over the next hour, I watched the stove as I baked a loaf of no-knead bread to go with the brunch, chopped fresh cilantro, and added hominy to the stew when it was almost done.
By twelve thirty, my three guests had arrived. Jordan was nearly unresponsive, she was so hungover. It didn’t help matters much that it was unbearably hot that morning. I brought my single fan into the living room and tried to air out the room, but between baking the bread and simmering the stew for an hour and a half, plus the sunlight streaming in through the windows, the heat was scorching.
I’d turned the heat off under the pot of menudo about a half hour earlier, once I’d tasted the stuff. While doing so, I noticed that the squares of tripe had not only shrunken to about half their size, but were the texture of soft jelly rather than rubber and were becoming softer the longer they cooked. They had also turned from off-white to deep brown, thanks to the burgundy broth they were simmered in. The hominy, since it had been added so much later, added some nice contrast in that it was still white. I’d had cold salsas that had hominy in them before, but I’d never had it in a soup or stew. The pale pellets of preserved corn tasted a lot like fresh tortillas and were a welcome, neutral addition to the stew.
It was a humid morning, and a short-lived downpour had added to the moisture the steaming stockpot had already brought to the room. We sat down at the small table in the middle of the room. Just as I’d predicted, Aaron looked the worst off. His eyes were bleary and half-open, his throat scratchy sounding when he spoke. Jordan had probably suffered the worst of her hangovers for the weekend the morning before that one, but she still was definitely not at 100 percent. Mai didn’t look too bad, nor did she say she felt so bad herself. I was strangely awake, and very hungry. Everyone dove for the bread first.