From Why We Eat What We Eat, p. 188:
...I goggled at the whole beef heads complete with tongue (there were calves' and lambs' heads as well), and I was taken aback to see three of the four kinds of beef tripe. When they sell tripe at all, U.S. markets normally offer only the honeycomb tripe from the second stomach of the animal. Cattle, as true ruminants, have four stomachs: the rumen (or paunch), the reticulum (or honeycomb), the manyplies (or psalterium or omasum), and the abomasum (or read). All four, canonically, go into the classic French tripe stew, tripe a la mode de Caen.
Mom and dad, having just returned from a wonderful trip to France, told me about the tasty tripe stew. I got to thinking: I want to make some tripe stew.
I drove around Atlanta for hours, searching for tripe at Kroger's and the other supermarkets. No luck. As a last attempt, I took the highway way out to Chamblee-Tucker to visit the 99 Ranch. I figured: they're asian, they've gotta have weird meats like tripe. Jackpot! I bought several pounds of honeycomb tripe, packaged in a styrofoam tray as nonchalantly as chicken breast.
When I got home, I immediately started cooking. The tripe needed to cook for many hours. Ivana, Antonio's fiancee, came home while I was washing and slicing the tripe. When she saw what I was doing, her eyes widened. "Trippa!" she exclaimed. Squeezing past me in the narrow kitchen, she took a lemon out of the fridge, cut it in half, and squeezed some juice over some tripe. Then she casually popped the raw tripe in her mouth.
"Holy crap!" I exclaimed. Ivana encouraged me (dared me?) to try it, so I did. Like many weird foods, it was mostly about texture. Crunchy, with the lemon juice covering the faint hint of bleach(*).
Afterwards, I saw Ivana in a new light. Ivana had already forced me to revise my opinion of Italian food. But now I saw her as an uber-foodie, a woman who, in addition to embodying all that is good about Sicilian food, also munched on raw cow stomach as if it were carrot sticks.
The tripe stew was a complete failure. The band-aid on my finger slipped into the stew as I was preparing it; hidden amongst the other bandage-sized, flesh-colored strips of tripe, it never reappeared. In any case, I didn't stew the tripe for long enough. We tried a bowl, then threw the rest away.
(*) most of the tripe sold in stores isn't technically raw. it's first bleached and partially cooked.
(**) Antoni gave me his recipe for PastaWithCauliflower.