Tripe played a starring role in the programme. I never knew that there were actually four different types of tripe - one for each stomach of the cow. They have great names - blanket or smooth type, honeycomb/pocket tripe, leaf/book tripe, and reed tripe.
At Bolton market you can buy it ready to eat. People eat it cold and sprinkled with vinegar, though presenter Andrew Hussey didn't even attempt this. Bolton used to have a chain of restaurants called UCP (United Cattle Products), specialising in tripe. For some reason these restaurants no longer exist.
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| Sorry about the disgusting picture! Photo by Charles Roffey |
Does anyone eat tripe any more? Lots of other countries do. In Florence, for example, they love it and eat it from street stalls. Particularly popular is lampredotto, which is reed tripe from the fourth stomach, which is softer and outside Florence, not eaten as much as the others.
Last year the Scottish government spent £300,000 on promoting tripe, including a new guide for meat processors on how to harvest it from the carcass. Apparently offal, cheeks and such like are known in the meat trade as "the fifth quarter". Quality Meat Scotland, which was behind this initiative, says that between 2008 and 2010 the Scottish meat industry turned the £2.2 million cost of disposing of non-carcass parts into a £13.3 million revenue stream. I'm not sure whether this is because of a rush in demand for tripe, or because they were doing something else with it - selling it for dog food or fertiliser, maybe.
Let me know what you think about tripe...
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Back home in California a good number of Mexican restaurants feature menudo, a tripe-based soup that's garnished with chopped white onion, herbs, chili flake, and lime, on their menus. It's an experience to eat, let me tell you, and I do enjoy it. Now living in LDN, I'd be hard-pressed to find it!
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