16 Comments

Jeezo, I love your posts. Tripe prepared as you've described sounds repellent. But, pickled, dredged in flour, dipped in egg and fried ... well, that's a delicious meal served with a great big salad. As the daughter of a fisherman, my memories of beef linger in the organs department. And I have to say that my mother's pickled tripe was a favorite to my child self. Give it a try!

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I'm intrigued! They don't count as more than offal, but I had chilli spiced deep fried gizzards at a Vietnamese restaurant this week. I suspect tripe strips would respond well to that treatment, too, given what you say about dipping in flour and egg and frying.

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Mar 27Liked by Julia Watson

You should taste the stuffed lamb tripe prepared the Lebanese way, if you can get someone to make it. The small pouches are washed and rubbed with lemon juice, vinegar and orange blossom water. The stuffing is rice, minced meat, chick peas, onions and toasted pine nuts. After the stuffed and sewn up pouches are cooked until tender with spices and bay leaves, they are scooped out of the pot and placed in a pan to toast in the oven. When golden, the small stomachs are slit open and eaten with cold yogurt and a little of the broth. Nobody makes this dish anymore. I remember my grandmother making it. We used to run out of the house when she did. Much later in life, when I was a guest at my lawyer’s house, I politely sampled some his mother had prepared. It was not all that bad, and toasted after cooking, the texture was a little more tolerable.

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Nora! Hello! This does indeed sound beyond delicious. I'm not against tripe, just in some unimaginative expressions of its possibilities. I am a serious fan of haggis, for instance. But what you write about is worth taking a flight to find. I'm alarmed at the rate in which traditional recipes are becoming lost - it sounds as though this is another. Come to the Zeg festival (Google it - I don't know how to make a link on Substack...) in Tbilisi this June. I'm moderating a discussion on this very subject.

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You can't rate tourain lower than mique, SURELY? If there's a more disgusting dish anywhere in the world, never mind just SW France, I'd be shocked.

If you've never been fed a mique, I envy you. It's bread dough studded with uncooked pig fat and then boiled till allegedly edible although none of the dogs under the table would have anything to do with my attempts to feed it to them.

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It's odd - and I may be away off course here - but in my eating experience France really does have more revolting cucina povera dishes than any other EU country.

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French food is fundamentally about using sauces to disguise bad ingredients. Blanquette de veau anyone? 🤮

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Whereas British food, the French might argue, was about disguising good ingredients with poor cooking technique.

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😂😂😂 I think that about sums it up. Thank god for immigration, or we'd still be eating boiled meat and mushy veg.

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Mar 27Liked by Julia Watson

I love the humour with which your articles are written. And while I am, in general, quite happy to eat various forms of offal, tripe is not one of them! I always thought it resembled nothing so much as the contents of the nappy bucket ... (my kids had terry nappies). Some of those dishes you list - no, no thanks! Especially the one the basset turned his nose up at! Mind you, if he'd been a Labrador, he'd probably have scoffed it and come back for more ... keep up the good work, and enjoy that luscious-looking roast

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Thank you! I'm very pleased if I sometimes raise a smile. Your nappy bucket reminds me of a line food critic AA Gill once wrote since which I've never eaten a wrap. He said they reminded him of a filled nappy. A much missed writer.

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Thank you Julia... you brought me back to the early 90,s to be precise. My landlord/chef was a culinary cross between Julia Child and Alice Waters; he made tripe. And if I were to cast minds eye back to end 80s; in kitchen on Hanover Steps Dad made pork with apples so much it's taken until this very moment to consider it again. Magician with pen are you. happy puddle jumping, Suzanne

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I'm so pleased! Did he feed you tripe? And did you enjoy it? Thank you for the compliment...

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Tripe landlord yes... tongue as well

Dad Liver and 🧅 yes...loved smell, texture not so much

My contribution ..after cooking bacon, sausage (maple sausage imho) whatever your pork based meat product might be toss inuts for a nice hot enrobing; final resting place granola. But before you leap off the bus mix in fav red pepper jelly, then mix into your granola recipe of choice...gotta go eat my bliss thanks for playing🧇🧇

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Did you ever determine why you kept being arrested in Greece? And what did you do in the time you lived there?

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I was young and naive and moved to a village that had no experience of foreigners. I think the police suspected I was a Woman of Ill Repute. I taught English to the children of people who, eventually, didn't agree with the police but lived off the royalties of a book of poetry for children. Life was cheap.

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