Kids these days will never know the glory of the tripe stall

[Tben]

When I was growing up in the 1980s, I used to go shopping in the town centre with my Gran every Saturday. Amongst our many ports of call, we’d always go to the tripe stall on the fish and meat market to get some tripe for my Grandad.

A whole stall devoted to selling the stomach lining of a cow.

Kids these days will never know of such things. Tripe
is gone, never to come back. I was there, at the end, as it passed into history.

I hated it myself of course - the look, the smell, just… no.

I'm an adventurous eater - but tripe is a big no-no. I last ate it 40 years ago.
Kids will never know the urine smell of a public telephone box either. That's on a par with tripe 😂

I remember they also sold brown stuff in a block called Elder. Only as an adult did I find out that Elder is a cow’s udders.

I just discovered this week that dissolvable stitches are made from sheep intestines, we may not eat tripe but our wounds are still being sewn up with sheep guts 😱.

I can’t even feed tripe to my dog!

I do love that it was treated like some kind of delicacy 😆

Our dog when I was a child had to eat tripe due to digestives issues. Used to get it frozen from the pet shop. It wasn’t the white stuff humans eat, but green smelly stuff. It was disgusting

Tripe is still available in The English Market in Cork city in Ireland, OP.
Just in case you miss it too much 😉

Are you by any chance talking about Sheffield Market? My mum used to cook Tripe & Onions when I was a kid with a mountain of mashed potatoes, I was never keen on the mash but I loved the Tripe & Onions, I always had an enormous bowl full & always went back for seconds, the only downside was getting the saucepan clean afterwards as it always used to catch on the inside of the pan. I still eat it now if ds is shopping in the Market, he brings me a 5kg bag & I cut it up into pieces & freeze it in meal sized portions, happily now I cook it in my Ninja 11 in 1 which means I no longer have a saucepan that is only fit for the bin afterwards.

Oh god, I just smelled that smell. The memory runs deep.

Our family dog had this too. Utterly grim. 🤢

We didn't have tripe as a child but we had a lot of haslet. Does that still exist?

Oh I remember once when I was a child, many many years ago, my mother served us tripe. I can still remember how disgusting it looked.
I don't know if I even tasted it but I do remember refusing to eat it and I was so adamant about it I was allowed not to - in those days we usually weren't allowed to leave the table unless we had eaten all our meal.

I also remember the time my mother cooked rabbit and my brother teased me that it was our neighbours pet rabbit, Bunty, that had died and we were about to eat. I was in floods of tears and refused to eat that as well.

Our meal times were the very opposite of fun and pleasure!

What did it smell like? I was a child of a privileged time, the closest thing to offal I've had is a sausage!

Same here. I probably sound very ungrateful but memories of regularly having to sit at the table and eat up all my liver, a massive great chunk with pipes running through it, before I was allowed to get down, still traumatises me to this day 🤢

historically they were, and some still are, but there are also synthetic absorbable sutures, so it's not a foregone conclusion you'd be getting animal-based ones.

Pipes?

I’m 56 and don’t remember tripe stalls in the UK, but I last tried to eat tripe in Florence.

I didn’t even manage one mouthful…

The big arteries and vessels running through it. We'd always call them pipes 😂

I don't know what my mother was thinking. She'd never have done that to her grandchildren.

Shudder

Haha mothers and their grandchildren are a different thing entirely!

OP: A whole stall devoted to selling the stomach lining of a cow.

I take your tripe stall and raise it to a tripe shop. I used to work near the one in Blackpool, which IIRC was on a side road between Dickson Road and the main library.

UCP Tripe. United Cattle Products.

I have never knowingly eaten tripe, although I remember school dinners of liver with pipes/tubes running through it.

I wasn’t then, but have been vegetarian for years.

It does!

I like haslet. And blood pudding. I like tripe, kidneys and liver, too, when cooked properly - something I often manage myself, but not always.

I only recently realised that butchers no longer have chunks of animal on display, only the pre-cut pieces. This must have changed years ago - but now I feel driven to visit a meat market in Turkey or somewhere, where the produce is recognisably dead animals 😳

Jesus where did you grow up?! I was an 80’s child and never saw such 🤢🤢
I do remember eating the bone marrow out of a roasted leg of lamb on multiple occasions though 🤢🤮

I don’t buy meat offal except for black pudding and haggis but I do feel guilty for the wasted food from all those animals raised for just steaks and breasts and shoulders. I think it’s incumbent upon meat eaters to try to use the meat really.

Haslet is basically stuffing isn’t it? Stuffing in slices?

I like other types of offal - liver, kidneys, haggis, black pudding….. all good 👍🏼

Exactly the same as us. I loved my mums tripe and onions, but I loved the mash too. It was in a lovely milky slightly peppery sauce.
Dad did sometimes have his tripe raw with vinegar on and salt & pepper. This was in the 70s.
Dad used to make devilled kidneys with toast on Christmas morning and I loved those too.
I still fry myself a bit of lambs liver now and again and make onion gravy, I can’t get it like mum did though.
I remember haslet, I’m sure they still sell it.
We used to have tongue sandwiches with mustard too.
Lovely 😄