Stewed Kidneys
After soaking the kidneys for several hours, parboil them until very tender. Flour them, put in a stewpan a good spoonful of butter, two spoonfuls of tomato or walnut catsup; pepper and salt. Stew well.
A terse Victorian-style stew that assumes you already know how to dress a kidney. The gaps worth filling are the trimming, the missing liquid, and what walnut catsup actually was.
- Trim before soakingVeal or lamb kidneys need the outer membrane peeled off and the white core cut out with the point of a knife; beef kidney needs the same and then cutting into 1-inch pieces. The soak the recipe calls for is a cold-water or lightly salted soak to draw off the ammoniac smell — an hour or two is plenty for lamb or veal, longer only for beef.
- Parboil, but watch it"Until very tender" is safe advice for beef kidney, which wants 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering. Lamb and veal kidneys are the opposite: past about 5 minutes they turn to rubber, so blanch them briefly and let the stewing finish the job.
- A spoonfulIn books of this kind an unqualified spoonful is usually taken to mean a tablespoon, though usage is not consistent. Read it as roughly 1 tablespoon butter and 2 tablespoons catsup; the recipe names no quantity of kidney, but that amount would suit about 1 lb.
- Walnut catsupNot a tomato product but a thin, dark, salty condiment made from green walnuts, vinegar and spice — closer to Worcestershire sauce, which is the practical modern stand-in. Mushroom ketchup does the same job. Tomato catsup, the alternative given, is far sweeter and will make a noticeably different dish.
- The missing liquid"Stew well" with only butter and catsup in the pan will scorch. Add about a cup of the parboiling liquid or beef stock once the floured kidney has taken a little colour; the flour on the meat thickens it into a gravy.
- Season at the endBoth walnut catsup and Worcestershire are heavily salted, so hold the salt until the sauce has reduced and you can taste it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities. Worked at about a pound of kidney it would serve two or three. Toast, boiled rice or mashed potato take up the gravy.
Kidney was cheap offal, and books of this period give it half a dozen ways — devilled, curried, on toast, or stewed as here. The distinguishing touch is the catsup: before the word narrowed to mean the tomato sauce, catsup covered a whole family of thin brown condiments built on vinegar, salt and spice, of which walnut and mushroom were the common domestic sorts. Green walnut catsup was generally made at home in midsummer, when the nuts were still soft enough to pierce with a pin, and a jug of it sat in the store cupboard doing the work a bottle of Worcestershire does now. Its presence in a recipe this short suggests a kitchen that still put up its own sauces.