Tripe (Mogodu)
South Africa
Senior Editor
Abuja, Nigeria ·
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3 hr 30 minMedium
Medium
55 minEasy
3 hr 35 minEasy
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Abuja, Nigeria ·
Mogodu is the South African name for tripe, and it is among the most strongly felt dishes in the country's food. South Africans do not hold moderate opinions about mogodu. It has people who would eat it every day and people who will not have it in the house, and both positions are held with conviction. Tripe is the stomach lining of a ruminant, most often beef, and it belongs to the category of cuts that were once cheap because they were unwanted. That history is part of what the dish carries. Offal in South Africa was for a long time what was left over, and the communities it was left to made it into something with a claim on the national table rather than a mark of going without. It is winter food for many households, cooked slowly over hours until the chew softens without disappearing entirely. The texture is the reason for both the devotion and the refusal, and it is not something a cook can engineer away. Mogodu is eaten with pap, and the pairing is not negotiable: the neutral maize takes the place that bread would take elsewhere, against a dish whose flavour comes mostly from long contact with what it was cooked in.
Mogodu is the Sesotho and Setswana word for tripe, and the dish belongs to the South African tradition of offal cookery, in which cuts left over from commercial butchery became established household food. Its earliest documented date is uncertain.
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Clean and chop the tripe.
Put water, salt, zeal spice, onion and the tripe into a pot.
Boil for 2 hours, checking on it regularly.
Once the tripe is half tender, add the chopped green pepper and the beef stock.
Cook for a further 15 minutes, then stir in the powdered soup.
Serve hot.
Personal notes from Amarachi IrobiBe the first to rate this recipe
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2 reviews
How do I get rid of the smell when cooking mogodu?
Clean it hard and blanch it. Rinse under running water, rub it with coarse salt and a little vinegar or lemon, then rinse again until the water runs clear. Blanch for ten minutes, throw that water away, and start the real cooking with fresh water and your aromatics. Most of the smell people complain about is in that first water.