Quaint Old English Customs No. 1: Bag, Tripe and Dripping in The Star

Quaint Old English Customs No. 1: Bag, Tripe and Dripping in The Star
by Ian Wigley

As a teenager first discovering alcohol (something I have since regretted) I used to drink in a pub called The Star. The pub was just around the corner from my parents’ place, and it sold very cheap beer (£1.02 pint in 1992); this was its original appeal. The Star was a regular haunt at which my friends and I would quite willingly throw our weekly spending allowances at.

The landlord of The Star was a man named Kelly, and his wife Chris was the right-hand woman of this fair establishment. The pub was run really well; there was never any trouble in there, never any heated words, the clientele were generally friendly and reliable—you could see the same people in the same places and have the same conversations on the same days of each week, consistently. Get me? Plus the same things were done on the same days of the week, week in, week out—namely, quiz night Thursday, Ladies darts Friday, games night Wednesday...catch the drift? It was a pub where change didn’t happen. People are often afraid of change. Kelly obviously was fully aware of this.

Now, each Monday night Kelly, a true Yorkshireman, hosted a strangely bizarre night, although I’m sure this was unintentional on his part. Kelly had a tripe, bag and bread-and-dripping night. Now let me explain what each of these things are before I go any further:

Tripe—Tripe is the lining of a cow's stomach. It’s a white, jelly-like dish which is eaten cold, and often sprinkled with salt and pepper.

Bag—Bag is cow’s udder, a more ‘rubbery’ dish, one which can be chewed more. Once again, eaten cold and often sprinkled with salt and pepper.

Dripping—Dripping is fat from beef or pork collected after one has roasted a beef or pork joint. The fat from the joint sits in the meat tray, gets cold and then turns hard, but not too hard to put your knife into and spread onto white bread. Bread and dripping can often be sprinkled with salt, or be covered with Bovril to add further to the meaty taste.

So, Monday night went like this–go to the pub, sit around for a couple of hours from 7pm, drinking Sam Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter at £1.02 a pint, talk about nothing, and then at 9pm Chris would fetch out all her best plates filled with loads of slices of bread-and-dripping, and plenty of tripe and bag. These would be positioned on the bar, close by where all the fine ales were delivered, and we would just help ourselves, no charge whatsoever. We would then take our gatherings back to where we were sitting. It was so wonderfully exquisite.

Tripe is awful, but it didn’t matter to us, we’d eat it anyway. I can feel the way tripe feels now as I sit in front of my PC. It’s slippery and slimy and coarse in places. If you didn’t put salt and pepper on the tripe, it’d just not taste—it’d taste like a plate of nothing. So, on with the salt and pepper and chew (well, kind of, given it’s jelly-like disposition), down the hatch, followed by a gulp of Sam Smith’s. Then more tripe, we usually averaged three or so 1 inch-long pieces a session, and the evening was well in flow.

Next came bag. I loved bag, so lovely it was. I liked cow’s udder, lots. Bag was more chewy, there was more you could get your teeth into, unlike tripe which seemed to just slip down your throat. I could have eaten bag all night, but not without the almost-mandatory salt and pepper on, it added to the flavour. Once again, three or so 1 inch-long pieces would be had by us all, betwixt mouthfuls of beer. But the real treat was yet to come.

Bread-and-dripping, food of lords. I love bread and dripping more than almost any food in the world. No, that’s a lie, I love it more than any food in the world, full stop. The dripping needs to be spread thinly on the bread, but not too thinly. The main white of the dripping often needs to contain some of the brown jelly found at the bottom of the meat tray, this gives it a salty twist that makes you kind of wince a little, lot like when you have too much Scotch in one mouthful. The bread turns a little moist when the dripping starts to seep into it, but that’s no worry, you’ll have eaten it before it gets chance to go soggy. On with the salt and pepper, and then down the hatch. When I lived with my parents as a child I could quite easily eat 12 slices of bread-and-dripping, easy, even at a tender age, the stuff is so adorable.

So, we’d probably only have two or three slices of bread-and-dripping in The Star on a Monday night. The forces of supply and demand prevented us from having more, but it didn’t matter, it was beautiful. I’d have lived on bread and dripping if I my Mum would have let me. As lovely as the stuff was, though, it always tasted better with Sam Smiths, and in The Star. My friends and I would leave The Star and beat a hasty retreat back home, stomachs filled with bag, tripe, and bread-and-dripping.

It was simple nights like those Monday nights that formed the blueprint for who I am now. I’d take a quiet night in The Star with a dozen plates of bag, tripe and bread-and-dripping over a night in a club being bombarded by hardcore dance music any day of the week. Maybe I’m being nostalgic, looking back through rose-tinted glasses at a time when I had little in the line of responsibilities, I don’t know. What I do know for certain is that pubs everywhere should remember about bread-and-dripping and bag and tripe, and they should leave Mondays free for a night of unhealthy food. They’d be raking in the cash.

Long may the memories of Monday night in The Star remain.

Ian can be reached at ian@babblog.com.