That is a Bunch of Tripe

September 27th and 28th marks the annual Polish Festival of St. Stanislaus Parish. Located about a half mile from the Saucyman World Campus, the festival is so much more than a tribute to pierog/pirogi and beer. There is music, cultural stuff, every sort of John Paul II memoribilia a person could want and up until a few years ago there was tripe soup. Friend of Saucyman, Charles Seluzicki has the story...

The old ladies, I prefer the Polish term of respect pani, I was told, were not cooking anymore and with them the great pot of flaczki - Polish tripe soup - was gone as well. Though I had grown up with many of the foods prepared by my immigrant Polish grandmother, I had never tasted tripe soup before having it at the Polish Festival held annually at St. Stanislaus Church in Portland. It was a revelation – The tender tripe in its beefy broth and simply flavored with onion, garlic and fresh herb belied the unhappy caricatures of tripe's "rubbery" texture, and its poor standing as a food.

In truth, the status of tripe has never been very high. Maria Dembinska's FOOD AND DRINK IN MEDIEVAL POLAND (1999) talks of farmers retaining it for their own use after selling off choicer cuts and preserving it for winter in barrels of sauerkraut in the same manner that wealthier classes held pork and corned beef. This preserved tripe, she reports, seems to have been eaten by all classes as a "cold weather emergency food." Jane Grigson, speaking of the breakdown of the system of strict divisions applied to meat preparation in later 19th century France, says: "Only the tripier seems to have lost prestige, supplying poor families and shabby hotels..."

Verbally tripe is rubbish, nonsense, specious reasoning. To diners, tripe doesn't enjoy a great reputation either. It is the stomach of any ruminant (grazing, grass eating) mammal, most commonly a cow. Anatomically, this stomach is a configuration of three stomachs, each with its own purpose, all edible, though the familiar honey-combed second stomach is the most popularly prepared. These days tripe is available cleaned and blanched, freeing the modern cook of the elaborate rituals of soaking and cleansing once, in centuries past, the sole province of the tripier who was exclusively licensed to prepare the innards of animals.


Tipplers and tripiers from Mexico to Europe to Turkey to the Pho loving Vietnamese universally agree that tripe soup, in widely various combinations of herbs and meats, is an effective hangover cure. The better Mexican restaurants here in town routinely have a pot of menudo (traditionally made with sheep's tripe) bubbling away on Saturday mornings. The hydrating function of soup is an obvious value to any bleary-eyed sot who can navigate his spoon into his mouth (the "other" drinking problem.) But tripe is very rich in collagen as well. It is the drinker's collagen, all of that connective joint tissue, that is particularly effected by alcohol, producing the resultant achy, robotic articulation of limbs so perfectly attuned to diminished brain function. If the science is still out on this one (and it appears to be), the drinkers of the world have spoken.

Charles Seluzicki