Home › The Principles of Cookery › BULLOCK'S KIDNEY, FRIED (another way)
BULLOCK'S KIDNEY, FRIED (another way)
Soak a bullock's kidney for an hour or more in warm water. Cut it into thin slices, drain, dry, and season with pepper and salt, and dredge them lightly with flour. Fry gently till they become a light brown colour; put the slices into a saucepan, doubling them a little one over the other. Make a gravy with the butter in the pan, and a small quantity of flour to thicken. Add a table-spoonful of vinegar if liked, with a tea-spoonful of sugar; stew the kidney in this till quite tender. Time to fry, from eight to ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 5d. Sufficient for three persons.
A plain Victorian supper dish of beef kidney, fried then braised in a sweet-sour gravy. Two things need attention: the preparation of the kidney itself, and the fact that the original never says what liquid the gravy is made with.
- "Bullock's kidney" is beef kidney"Bullock's kidney" is beef (ox) kidney -- a whole one typically weighs somewhere between 1 and 2 lb, and it is among the strongest-tasting kidneys sold. Butchers and halal or Caribbean shops carry it; lamb's kidney is milder if you want the same dish with less assertion.
- Trim before you soakSplit the kidney and cut out the white core and fat with scissors or a small knife. The core is what carries most of the ammoniacal smell, and no amount of soaking fixes it if it is left in.
- Soak in salted or acidulated cold waterThe hour in warm water is doing the job of drawing out blood and urea, but warm water sitting on offal for an hour is not good practice. Cold water with a spoonful of salt or vinegar, changed once, for an hour in the refrigerator, achieves the same thing.
- The missing liquidThe recipe says to make a gravy from the pan butter and flour, then stew the kidney in it, but never names a liquid. Beef stock or water has to be added; for a dish serving three, something in the region of half a pint to a pint. Without it there is nothing to stew in.
- Frying time is not cooking timeEight to ten minutes browns the slices. Beef kidney slices then need roughly 45 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer, covered, to come tender. Held between those two states they are rubbery.
- Vinegar and sugarA tablespoon of vinegar and a teaspoon of sugar in the gravy is a gentle sweet-sour finish, comparable to the German and Swiss saure Nieren (usually made with veal kidney). Malt or cider vinegar suits it better than wine vinegar. The recipe has the vinegar going in before the stewing, so its sharpness cooks down.
- Cost and yield1s. 5d. for a dish feeding three was cheap set against butcher's joints, though not a trivial sum in a late-Victorian household. Three servings is accurate if there is bread, mashed potato or rice to carry the gravy.
Cassell's gives beef kidney several entries because it was one of the cheapest sources of meat in a late-Victorian British household: strong-flavoured and slow to cook. The sweet-sour gravy here — vinegar cut with sugar, thickened with the frying butter and flour — is a very old English treatment for strong meats, and the same combination turns up in medieval sauces for venison and in the sour kidney dishes of German and Austrian cookery. Kidney's more famous British outings are steak and kidney pudding and the devilled kidneys of the breakfast sideboard, but those use the tenderer lamb's or veal kidney; ox kidney, as here, is generally the braising and pie-filling grade. The book's inclusion of "probable cost" against each recipe is itself a period marker.