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Kidney, Ox, Stewed
Cut a fresh ox kidney into slices the eighth of an inch in thickness, soak them for a few minutes in lukewarm water, drain, and dry them thoroughly in a cloth. Season them with a little pepper, dredge flour thickly over them, and fry them in three ounces of hot butter, or dripping, until they are brightly browned. Pour over them as much cold water or stock as will cover them, and add a dessert-spoonful of vinegar in which onions have been pickled, or, if this is not at hand, plain vinegar or lemon-juice; a finely-minced shallot, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a little salt and cayenne. Stew gently until done, and thicken the gravy before serving it. Half a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard may be stirred into the sauce before it is taken from the fire, if this is liked. Time to stew, two hours. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A straightforward Victorian offal stew that depends on two things: getting the kidney clean and keeping the pot below a simmer. Both are easy to get wrong.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: keep it below a boil -- kidney protein tightens and tends to go rubbery at a rolling boil, and extra time will not fully undo it. The recipe's own instruction is to "stew gently": keep the liquid at a bare shiver, with the surface barely moving.
- Ox kidney is beef kidneyAsk a butcher for beef kidney; supermarkets rarely stock it. Expect a multi-lobed kidney of roughly 1 to 2 lb, which needs the outer membrane peeled off and the white core of fat and tubes cut out before slicing.
- The soak mattersA few minutes in lukewarm water is the minimum; 30 minutes in cold water, or in milk, draws out more of the ammoniac smell. Drying thoroughly afterwards is not optional, since wet kidney will steam rather than brown in the fat.
- TimingThe recipe specifies two hours of gentle stewing. Slices an eighth of an inch thick may well be tender well before that, so it is worth checking from around 45 minutes and stopping when a slice yields easily to a fork.
- MeasuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons. Three ounces of butter or dripping is about 6 tablespoons, which is generous for a pan of kidney slices; 2 to 3 tablespoons will brown them without leaving the gravy greasy. Dripping here means beef dripping.
- ThickeningThe flour dredge alone gives a thin gravy once it is diluted. Finish with beurre manié (equal butter and flour kneaded together) whisked in off the heat, or a slurry cooked out for two minutes.
- The pickled-onion vinegarIt supplies acid plus a little onion and spice from the jar. Any liquor from a jar of pickled onions works; failing that, malt vinegar with a pinch of the pickling spices, or plain cider vinegar.
- Yield and servingServes two or three as written. Mashed or boiled potatoes, or plain rice, take the gravy; the optional mustard is worth doing, and the recipe stirs it in just before the pan comes off the fire, since prolonged heat dulls its pungency.
Ox kidney was one of the cheapest sources of meat protein in a Victorian British kitchen, and Cassell's prices this dish at 1s 6d for two or three people. That economy is why kidney turns up everywhere in nineteenth-century English cookery, most famously eked out with beef in steak and kidney pudding and pie, where its strong flavour and gelatinous gravy carry a much larger quantity of cheaper filling. The pickled-onion vinegar looks like a characteristic touch of household thrift: the liquor left in the jar may well have been put to use in its own right, cutting the richness of offal, though this recipe is the only evidence here for the practice. Recipes of this kind sat in the reference-dictionary format that Cassell's used, arranged alphabetically so a cook could look up whatever the butcher had sent that morning.