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Broiled Kidneys with Green Peppers
Split some fine beef kidneys, remove the outer skin and sinews, and wipe well. Sprinkle the kidneys with pepper and salt, and let stand for an hour or more. Dip them then, into melted Crisco and broil over a clear fire. Meanwhile, chop 2 green peppers, freed from their seeds, and fry with 1/2 a teaspoon chopped onion and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley in Crisco till the pepper is quite done, having no more moisture, or Crisco that is in the pan, than is necessary to cook the green peppers. Dish the kidneys and surround with the sauce of green peppers.
A brief savory from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, written for cooks who bought kidneys whole and grilled over coals. The instructions assume knowledge the modern cook may not have, and beef kidney in particular needs handling the original never mentions.
- Soak the kidney firstBeef kidney is strongly flavored and benefits from an hour in cold salted water or milk, changed once, before the seasoning stage. The recipe skips this, which is the likeliest reason a modern attempt tastes of ammonia.
- Beef versus lamb"Fine beef kidneys" means the whole multi-lobed ox kidney, which is tough and best braised. Lamb or veal kidneys, split and skewered flat, are far better suited to broiling and are the ones more usually found at a butcher today.
- Trim the coreThe recipe's "skin and sinews" is the instruction to follow: cut out the white fatty core and the tubes radiating from it as well as the membrane. Anything left there stays chewy no matter how it is cooked.
- A clear fireCoals burned down to a steady glow with no flame. Under a modern broiler, put the rack close to the element and preheat it fully.
- TimingThe original gives none. Split kidneys, cut thin, need only a few minutes a side and are best left faintly pink at the center; cooked past that they turn rubbery and bitter.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, then a novelty and the reason this book exists. Any neutral oil works for the dipping, and butter or olive oil gives the peppers more flavor.
- The peppers"Quite done, having no more moisture" means cooking the peppers right through with no more liquid or fat left in the pan than the cooking needs — a slower fry than the word suggests. The parsley is better added near the end so it stays green.
- YieldOne beef kidney serves three or four as a savory; count two lamb kidneys per person. Serve on toast if it is standing in for a breakfast or supper dish.
This comes from a Crisco recipe book of the 1910s, one of a genre of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that put a branded fat into every dish on the page, including ones where lard, butter or beef suet had done the job for centuries. Kidneys were then everyday food rather than an oddity: cheap, sold by every butcher, and standard on British and American breakfast and supper tables, where devilled or grilled kidneys sat alongside eggs and bacon. The green peppers are the American touch, a garnish that would have read as mildly modern at the time, as sweet peppers were moving from regional and immigrant cooking into more general household use.