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Kidney Irish Stew
Cut an ox kidney into pieces about one and a half inches square, first removing the hard core out of the middle. Season with salt and pepper, and put it into a saucepan with an onion finely minced, and a quarter of a pint of water, or stock. Let the liquid boil, and remove the scum carefully; then put half a dozen large peeled potatoes into the pan, and simmer gently until they are sufficiently cooked, but unbroken. Put the kidney in the middle of a dish, arrange the potatoes round it, pour the gravy over all, and serve as hot as possible. Time, one hour to simmer the stew. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A one-pot dish with almost nothing in it, which means the two things that matter are the kidney's preparation and keeping the liquid at a bare simmer. Get those right and the rest follows.
- Trim and soak the kidneyOx (beef) kidney has a hard white core, which the recipe tells you to cut out; the surrounding fat is generally trimmed away as well. Kidney pieces are often soaked in cold salted water or milk for an hour and drained before cooking to soften the strong smell, though the book says nothing about it.
- Ox kidney is not lamb kidneyOx kidney is tough and wants long, slow moist cooking. One hour at a genuine simmer will do it if the pieces are cut small as directed, but taste one before serving; if it is still resistant, give it another 20-30 minutes and add a little more liquid. Lamb's kidney substituted here would be ruined in the same time.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 2/3 cup. That is very little liquid for an hour's cooking, so keep the lid on and the heat low, and top up with hot stock if the pan threatens to go dry.
- Choose the potatoes for shape"Sufficiently cooked, but unbroken" is the whole trick of the dish. Use a waxy or all-purpose variety, not a floury baker, and add them whole as instructed rather than cut up — six large potatoes will take roughly 30-40 minutes in the covered pan.
- Skim before the potatoes go inKidney throws a grey scum as the liquid comes up to the boil. Remove it properly at that point; once the potatoes are in you cannot skim without breaking them, and the gravy will be cloudy.
- Seasoning and bodyThere is no flour, no browning and no herb in the original, so the gravy is thin and mild. It will take a bay leaf, a little thyme, or a spoonful of the potato liquid mashed back in, and it needs more salt and pepper than you would expect at the end.
- Yield and costThree to four servings, as stated. The "1s. 6d." is a Victorian price of the kind this book routinely gives for household budgeting; it has no straightforward modern equivalent.
Irish stew proper is mutton, onion and potato stewed in water, and the phrase in Victorian cookbooks came to mean any such plain layered stew of meat, onion and whole potatoes with no thickening and no browning. Substituting ox kidney is a frugal variation of exactly the kind Cassell's specialised in: kidney was among the cheapest offal at the butcher, sold by the piece. The technique being taught is the simmering of tough meat in barely enough liquid, with the potatoes cooking in the same pan. The insistence on serving it "as hot as possible" may reflect kitchens that were often a long walk from the dining room.