BY Bill Handleman • STAFF COLUMNIST • May 10, 2009 Life is about trying new things.
Good for the soul, you tell yourself, expands the mind. You stop learning, you stop living. And so on. Then one day somebody invites you to a tripe dinner at an Italian social club and you’re thinking this must be the big test, the final exam. As a child, you once saw tripe at the butcher shop, from a safe distance. It looked like some sort of weird spongy hair net. You remember recoiling in horror when the butcher explained what it was. You can still hear him laughing. To this day, his small yellow teeth haunt your dreams. Now, you picture yourself at some fancy dinner with a plateful of tripe sitting in front of you and Luca Brasi standing over you. “Mangia,” he growls. “But it’s cow’s stomach,” you protest weakly, lifting the fork to your mouth. So it was with great trepidation that I accepted the invitation to dinner at the local headquarters of the Amerigo Vespucci Society, which took its name from the famous 15th century Italian explorer and mapmaker.
There are no records to indicate how Mr. Vespucci felt about tripe. But we do know that the members of the club on Willow Avenue have been holding an annual tripe dinner here since 1973, when Thomas Gagliano Sr. started the tradition.