Tripes à la Mode de Caen

Tripes a la mode de Caen is a traditional dish of Normandy, France, built from beef offal, principally the four chambers of a cow's stomach along with hooves and bones. The tripe is layered with carrots, onions, leeks, garlic, cloves, peppercorns and a bouquet garni, then simmered for around fifteen hours with cider and calvados in a sealed earthenware pot called a tripiere. Local tradition holds the dish tastes best in autumn, when cattle have grazed on fallen apples, and legend credits its invention to a fourteenth-century Benedictine monk, Sidoine Benoit, at the Abbaye-aux-Hommes in Caen.