Letters To Bourdain

Dear Chef Bourdain;

Fuck you, man. Fuck you for putting “Tripes Les Halles” in your book. It wasn’t that the dish itself is nasty – which it kinda was, and kinda wasn’t. I mean, it’s a big stew of bits and bobs and cracklin’s and gurglings, so some of those …bits… aren’t half bad. But god dammit, chef, the odor of stewing tripe! That is…wow. And it just pervades the entire house.

And I thought they smelled bad on the outside...

My lovely fiancee was at first pretty enthusiastic, especially when we were shopping for the more esoteric chunks at Super King. But when I started on the first night of three nights of horror, she sort of blanched, and did her best to keep the smell out of the bedroom. It didn’t work.

It smells a lot worse than it looks.

I’ve tried to come up with the words to express the smell of simmering tripe – both kinds, feathered and honeycomb – but ..it’s tough. “Boiled ass?” “Hot fuckall?” “Stewed garbage?” I just don’t know. But it’s not good, and it’s relentless. The pig’s ears and calves’ hooves weren’t so bad – really sort of typical porky smell, which is not half  bad at all.

Porky goodness

But that tripe? Good lord. You hinted obliquely that it would smell better after the first awful step. What you didn’t mention was how it would seep into every crack and corner of the house. It wasn’t that it smelled super awful, but it did smell pretty bad, and you just couldn’t shake it. Anyway, I simmered the tripe and an unpeeled, halved onion for three hours and drained it. I also simmered the pork belly, pig’s ears and hooves for two and a half hours.

I reserved the pig juice for the rest of the recipe, and called it a night. It was pretty late  by the time I was done, because there’s pretty much no weekend day that you can cook for three days before and still not be on a work night. That was a complicated sentiment, but what I basically mean was, I got a short night’s sleep in a house redolent with the scent of boiled cow stomach. It wasn’t good chef. Not good at all.

Fortunately the rest of the ordeal wasn’t as bad as that first night. But yeah, I’m seriously glad there’s no more tripe recipes in the book.

I’ll fill you in on the feast, later.

Davy