Take a fresh kidney; clean and cut into thin slices; run a skewer through them to hold them together. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and brush with butter; put on a broiler and cook for five minutes. Then place on a platter; pour over some lemon-juice and hot butter; sprinkle with parsley and serve at once.
A one-page recipe that assumes you know what a kidney looks like before it is trimmed. The whole dish hangs on high heat and a very short cook.
- Which kidneyThe book says only "a fresh kidney," without specifying the animal; lamb or veal is the likeliest intention. Lamb kidneys are the right size for this treatment; a beef kidney is far too strong and too tough for five minutes of broiling.
- TrimmingPeel off the thin outer membrane, then cut out the pale fatty core at the centre with the tip of a knife. Left in, it stays chewy and carries most of the ammoniac flavour people object to.
- Soak firstThirty minutes in cold water or milk, then a thorough pat dry, mellows the flavour noticeably. Dry surfaces matter: wet kidney steams rather than browns.
- "Put on a broiler"This most likely means a hinged wire gridiron over live coals rather than an overhead grill, though some ranges of the period had a broiling compartment. The modern equivalents are a very hot ridged pan or a grill preheated to its highest setting, with the rack close to the element.
- Five minutes is the hingeThin slices need roughly two minutes a side and should stay rosy in the middle. Kidney passes from tender to rubbery within about a minute of overcooking, and no amount of butter recovers it.
- The skewerThread the slices flat and loosely so heat reaches both faces. Metal skewers are easier here; soak wooden ones if that is what you have.
- Butter and lemonMelt the butter and warm the lemon juice separately rather than pouring cold juice over hot meat, which drops the temperature at once. Season the finished dish again on the platter.
- YieldOne lamb kidney per person is a small first course; two each makes a light main. Toast or fried bread underneath catches the butter and juices.
Broiled kidney on a skewer belongs to a wide family of quick offal dishes found from Andalusia to the London chophouse, and the "Spanish" label in this book is doing light work: the lemon, parsley and butter finish is closer to a generic late-Victorian grill than to anything regionally specific. Books of this kind, arranged as a dish a day with a nation attached to each, hang their national attributions loosely. What the recipe does record accurately is the period's easy familiarity with offal. Kidneys were cheap, sold fresh by the butcher still in their suet, and appeared at breakfast and supper as readily as at dinner; the assumption that a cook would know how to clean one without being told is the clearest date-stamp on the page.