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Garnish for Poultry, Game, Etc
Put a quarter of a pound of fresh butter into a stewpan, and, when it is hot, fry in it equal quantities of lean ham and kidney, either mutton or veal, cutting the meat into thin slices of equal size. Mince a little parsley, strew it over these slices, add pepper and salt, and squeeze in the juice of a lemon. When lightly browned on both sides, place the meat and the gravy round the poultry, etc., which it is intended to garnish. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, mutton kidneys, 2d. each. Sufficient, four kidneys for one large fowl.
A Victorian meat garnish meant to be spooned around a roast fowl or game bird rather than eaten alone. The single thing to get right is the kidney: the quarter-hour in the original will turn it to rubber.
- Cook the kidney fastSliced kidney needs 2-3 minutes a side over a brisk heat and should stay faintly pink at the centre. Held for the stated quarter of an hour it tightens and turns grainy; the original's time may be meant to cover the whole operation rather than the kidney alone.
- Butter quantityA quarter of a pound is 4 oz / 115 g, generous by modern standards for the volume of meat here. Half that is enough to fry in; the rest can be swirled in at the end if you want a fuller pan sauce.
- Mutton kidneyMutton kidneys are effectively unavailable now. Lamb kidneys are the direct substitute and roughly half the size, so allow eight for the four called for. Halve them, snip out the white core and any membrane, and slice thinly.
- Lean hamThis means dry-cured ham off the bone, not sandwich ham. A thick slice of gammon or a good country ham cut into strips behaves correctly; prosciutto works but will crisp rather than brown.
- SaltSeason after the ham has released its salt into the butter. Cured ham plus a reduced buttery gravy can easily overshoot; taste before adding any.
- Lemon and parsleyBoth go in at the very end, off the heat. Lemon juice added early will boil down and lose its lift, and parsley strewn into hot butter for fifteen minutes goes drab.
- StewpanA wide, shallow saucepan with straight sides. Any heavy frying pan or sauté pan does the job; you want surface area so the slices brown instead of steaming.
- Quantity and useFour mutton kidneys with matching ham is given as sufficient for one large fowl as garnish. The meat is arranged around the base with the pan juices poured over.
- Cost note"2d. each" is twopence in pre-decimal currency, a reminder that offal was the cheap end of the butcher's counter and this was a way of dressing up a plain roast without buying more expensive meat.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a joint or a bird rarely came to table unaccompanied: the garnish was a course of its own logic, expected to add richness, colour and a second flavour to something as plain as a boiled fowl. Kidney and ham fried in butter with lemon and parsley is essentially the filling of a Victorian savoury pudding or pie deployed loose around a platter, and the pairing of cured pork with offal is old and practical, the salt and fat of the ham compensating for the leanness of the kidney. The "probable cost" and "sufficient" notes attached to recipes in the book are a period signature, written, it is often said, for a household cook who had to account for spending, and they show how far offal sat below butcher's meat in price. Mutton kidneys, larger and stronger than lamb's, were commonplace in Britain while sheep were routinely kept to two or three years for wool and mutton; their near-disappearance from shops is a consequence of the shift to slaughtering lambs young.