"No matter how it's cooked, tripe [the lining of the first stomach of the cow] is an ordinary dish," wrote the renowned Italian cookbook author Pellegrino Artusi a little more than a century ago. "I find it poorly suited to delicate digestions, though this is perhaps less true if it's cooked in the Milanese style, which renders it tender and light...In some cities, tripe is sold already boiled; this is undeniably handy."
A bit of background is necessary here. Artusi was quite wealthy (he made enough money from dealing in silks to retire in 1850, when he was 30 years old), and thought of tripe as something fit for a humble family meal -- not the sort of dish one would offer guests.
Many of his contemporaries saw it in a considerably different light, however: It was cheap enough that almost anyone could afford to buy it once a week or perhaps even more often (up until the 1950s, a large segment of the Italian population was too poor to eat meat more than once or twice per week; their poverty was simply called miseria and is the primary reason so many emigrated), and therefore tripe was a very common meal in the poorer sections of town. And its byproduct, tripe broth, was even more common. What is today a stylish antique shop in Florence was a tripe boiler's at the turn of the century (around 1905), and though the smells produced by the processing of the tripe were described as "ghastly," the tripe they produced was quite tasty, and perfect for flavoring bread or rice.
"
