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Kidney Soup
1/2 pound ox kidney, 1/2 pound lean beef, 3 pints brown stock, 3 tablespoons coarsely chopped fat bacon, 1 tablespoon chopped onion, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons Crisco, salt and pepper to taste.
Wash kidney and beef quickly, dry them, and cut them up quite small. Melt Crisco in saucepan, add bacon, onion, and kidney, and fry them until brown. Add stock and salt to taste, and simmer soup for about 2 1/2 hours. Strain out solid parts, pound them to a paste, and rub this through fine wire or hair sieve. Rinse out pan, mix flour smoothly and thinly with little of strained soup. Reboil rest of liquid, pour in flour, and stir it till it boils. Cook for ten minutes and carefully skim it. Then mix in smoothly sieved meat, add seasoning, reheat soup without boiling it after adding meat, and it is ready to serve. Water can replace stock; if so, add piece of carrot and turnip and bunch herbs to soup, but do not pound or sieve these. A more delicate soup is made with four or five sheep's kidneys instead of ox kidney. Add little caramel coloring if needed.
A Victorian-style offal soup, thickened twice: once with flour and once with the sieved meat itself. The whole point is the finished purée, so plan for the sieving stage rather than treating it as optional.
- Never boil after the meat goes back inOnce the sieved kidney paste is stirred into the thickened liquid, keep the soup below a simmer. Boiling makes the fine meat particles seize and go grainy, and the soup separates instead of staying velvety.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell the then-new hydrogenated shortening, so it appears where an older recipe would say dripping or butter. Two tablespoons of any neutral fat, beef dripping, or butter works the same.
- Ox kidneyBeef kidney from a butcher. Halve it, cut out the white core and any fat, and soak it in cold salted water or milk for an hour before use; older kidney carries a strong ammoniac smell that soaking blunts. Sheep's kidneys, as the note suggests, are milder and need only trimming.
- Quantities and yieldThree pints is six half-pints: roughly 1.7 litres by imperial measure, nearer 1.4 litres if the book's pints are American. Enough for six or so servings once the meat puree has gone back in. Brown stock means beef stock, generally built on browned or roasted bones.
- The hair sieveA drum sieve of woven horsehair, worked with a wooden mushroom. A food processor followed by a fine mesh strainer does the same job in a fraction of the time; press hard and scrape the underside of the strainer, since the yield of paste is what gives the soup body.
- TimingTwo and a half hours at a bare simmer suits kidney and lean beef cut small. The ten minutes of cooking after the flour goes in is there to lose the raw starch taste, not to reduce.
- Caramel colouringHousehold caramel, sugar burnt nearly black and let down with water, was sold in bottles for darkening soups and gravies. It is cosmetic only. Skip it, or brown the kidney and bacon harder at the start.
- Vegetable variantIf using water in place of stock, the carrot, turnip and herb bundle are aromatics to be lifted out and discarded, not sieved with the meat. Tie the herbs so they come out cleanly.
Kidney soup was a fixture of British and Anglo-American household cookery through the nineteenth century, one of a family of thick, dark, meat-puree soups, hare, ox-tail, mock turtle, that used cheap muscular cuts and offal and then disguised their origins behind long simmering and a sieve. The double thickening here, flour plus sieved meat, is the older technique: body came from the solids themselves. Its appearance in this book shows the recipe travelling into the twentieth century with the fat swapped out; Procter and Gamble introduced Crisco in 1911 and promoted it through cookbooks that reworked established dishes around it, which is why a thoroughly Victorian soup opens with shortening melted in a saucepan.