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 used to go to an indoor market with my dad in the 1980s and am pleased I don't recall the glory of the tripe stall, if indeed there still was one then. The smell of the butchers was bad enough.

If you go to Normandy Tripe à la mode de Caen is still popular and on lots of menus.
i remember it in Sheffield market. My MiL cooked it in white sauce with onions.

Tongue. I love it but the one time I tried to prepare it myself, I boaked so much I had to throw the damn thing away.

Have also eaten testicles - would definitely not prepare that myself - and brains, which I had to cook as part of my job but were disgusting! A friend has a story about being given a sheep's eye as a special delicacy while travelling. I'm not at all sure how I'd have coped with that ...

Yes, though the traditional version is pressed entrails. I got some of the original type from Sainsbury's (I think) last year.

My kids love tripe soup (flaki) and one of them asks for it on his birthday every year. From experience I can tell you you can buy it in some Polish and Jamacian shops.
I can't bear it but love them so do it!

Our local butchers makes and sells it.
Cannon ball sized lumps that look delicious but I just can't bring myself to try it

I was going to say that Leeds market still has a tripe stall but it seems it closed down in around 2013.

I remember it well and we were morbidly fascinated by the visual horror. DM used to tell us 2 things as we walked past, which was that her DGM, our great grandmother, who was alive and well at the time loved tripe, and that if we didn't behave she would ask her to cook it for us next time we visited, which is a tale for the 'kids today won't believe parenting in the 1970s' thread.

However I'm wondering if there's a covert tripe marketing campaign at work as this is the second time I've heard tripe being talked about this week, the first was on the latest BBC Kitchen Cabinet podcast, where they really didn't make it sound attractive at all. They did however, give a very good pitch for bulls testicles, so I see a surge in requests for those.

Also, when Googling for the current status of the Leeds market tripe stall, I found an article from just a few days ago about where to buy tripe in Leeds.

https://africanstores.co.uk/blog/where-to-buy-tripe-in-leeds

Reading that, it puts me off the innocent sounding dishes of Jollof rice and pepper soup as it claims tripe is a key ingredient.

I don’t remember having tripe but we did have roasted sheep hearts. A big coating of fat on the top with arteries and veins running through it. Didn’t taste too bad but looked as appealing as you might imagine.

I hope a lot of the offal goes into pet food.

A cousin of my Mum's still cooks and eats tripe. Her son (late 40s or early 50s) adores it, apparently, so he has found a butcher who sells it in bulk. He buys it and hands it over to his Mum. She prepares a vat of the stuff, which she then freezes in portions and they divide them up between them. His wife and family won't touch it.

Tinned tongue sandwiches.

Absolutely revolting.

I think a lot of offal does go into pet food, I'm sure I've seen tripe as an ingredient. There's also the catch all term 'animal derivatives'.

There was a tripe stall on our indoor market too. East Lancashire. Whilst my parents ate liver and kidneys, tripe never came home.

Tripe, elder, tongue, brawn, and various black puddings are still sold in the covered market of the northern town I grew up in. My mother loved honeycomb tripe, doused in vinegar and eaten cold. We all left the room.

My first holiday job was in a pork products factory.

It took a while to track down pukka black puddings in Melbourne for my Sunday breakfast. What I do notice in specialist meat shops - Tasman Meats, now re-branded as Tasman Butchers - that are not posh at all, is a range of stuff: tripe; chicken feet; casings for making salami; lambs' testicles; as well as lamb's pluck - the lungs, liver, and trachea to make haggis; kidneys; liver(s) hearts of chicken, lamb and beef. Its demographic is historically Greeks, Italians and UK/Irish/Aussie working class.

Asian butchers are a whole other world. I"m not fond of the "Asian" label as it feels vaguely lazy and racist, but as so many such shops, owned by SE Asians, call themselves this, I've shut up about it.

There was a tripe restaurant in Manchester when I was a child…always packed out with ‘old people’ (in my child’s eye view 😬). My grandma used to go every Friday with her friend Betty, and in school holidays me and my siblings were dragged along 🤮 The menu was vast…tripe with various additions, but the smell was the same…vile! My grandma always had tripe with steak and onions. I remember there was different kinds of actual tripe…some with ‘big holes’, some with much smaller ones, and different ‘shades’ of white-ish. Possibly the different stomach lining of the cow?? Not sure.

You can still buy it in the UK…my local butchers has it ‘to order’ (not on the counter though). I can’t imagine it’s a best seller 😂😵‍💫

Was the restaurant called UCP, @CloudyWithAChanceOfCustard? Also had jellied cow heels.

My mum used to go shopping on a Saturday at the local market . Outside the pie and mash shop was the eel stall.
Trays full of live eels. The shopper would pick the eels they wanted, then the stallholder would put them on a wooden slab and chop them into pieces. The pieces would all still wiggle. I still remember this and the smell 60 years later.

Yes it was! Opposite John Lewis?

They were all over the north at one time. The one in my home town is long gone.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/aug/12/tripe-the-lights-fantastic

and

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/nostalgia/lost-manchester-restaurant-sold-cow-25250320

They still sell it in Bolton market. .

My parents are from Italy. They came to this country in the 70s and when I was small they would together with their siblings, buy a whole tripe, clean it, and eat it together. Sort of tripe-eating parties. 🤢🤮 Also Made sausage like this. Big rolls of pig intestines in the fridge, ready for the ground meat to full. Not as gross as the tripe but…

Like some of the posters here, my cousins LOVED it. I couldn’t get over the smell, kind of poo-ey.

When I went back to Italy recently mu aunt was cooking it as a special treat. I had to decline the lunch Invitation. Never knowingly tried it, but apparently the honeycomb shared bits are the best.

Also: they would buy live eels at Christmas time, keep them in a bowl in the bath then kill them & Fry them fresh. It was unnerving going to the loo with those big slippery things gawping... 👀👀

I've never eaten tripe. My Mum doesn't like offal in any form so I didn't grow up eating it except the kidneys that used to come attached to pork chops, which I loved. I think she did occasionally cook steak and kidney, making sure that my Dad and I got the kidney and she got none. I like liver once in a way, as long as it's not full of tubes and just flash fried. Liver pate is lovely.

I remember the same, but at primary school, not at home. We weren't allowed to leave the table unless we had finished.
I was sick afterwards. Still can't eat liver.

Goodness. I've read that in Central Europe where lake-caught carp is traditional at Christmas it was, or maybe still is, the custom to transport live carp in tanks to the cities and towns and sell them (still alive) to be kept swimming, or trying to, in the bathtub until they were to be cooked, when somebody would have to bash the fish on the head before it was cooked. I suppose it was a practical solution to how to get fresh fish in the days before fridges and freezers.

That’s interesting. I always wondered if the tradition came from the fishermen bringing them back in time for the festivities. They are from Sicily so it makes sense that they’d need to keep the fish as cold & fresh as possible. They also prepare saltfish for those festivities - I read somewhere that this was an import from the days the sailors would pass through the from the Caribbean. I also saw it in Norway, once, possibly that was imported via Venice.

I hate these bits of animal being presented but I love the crystallised culture!

I hate the tripe stall 😩