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KIDNEY PIE (for breakfast or luncheon)
Take four veal kidneys, and half its bulk in fat with each. Cut them into slices a quarter of an inch thick, season rather highly with salt and cayenne, and add half a tea-spoonful of powdered mace for the whole. Cut the meat from a calf's foot, and season it in the same way. Place a layer of kidney at the bottom of a piedish, strew over it two ounces of finely-minced ham, and lay on this the slices of calf's foot. Repeat until the dish is nearly full. Put the hard-boiled yolks of six eggs and half a dozen forcemeat balls at the top, and pour over them a quarter of a pint of veal stock, flavoured with lemon-juice. Line the edges of the dish with a good crust, cover it with the same, and bake in a moderate oven. Though forcemeat balls are an improvement to the pie, they may be dispensed with. They are made as follows. Strain ten or twelve oysters from their liquor, mince them very finely, and mix them with four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, half a tea-spoonful of grated lemon-rind, and a little salt, cayenne, and mace. Mix these ingredients thoroughly. Bind them together with the unbeaten yolk of an egg and a little of the oyster liquor, make them into balls, and they are ready for use. This pie, which is generally a favourite, should be eaten cold. A good pie may be made with cold kidney and a few slices of the kidney-fat from a cold loin of veal, instead of fresh kidneys. Time, from an hour and a half to two hours to bake. Probable cost, 3s. 6s. 6d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A raised-pie-style cold luncheon dish that depends on gelatine from a calf's foot to set the stock into jelly. The critical point is that it is designed to be cut cold, so the filling must be well seasoned and the liquid must set.
- The hinge: the calf's footThe meat picked from a calf's foot brings gelatine with it, which helps the quarter-pint of stock set to a jelly as the pie cools, though the recipe does not say so. Without it the pie is likely to be wetter and harder to cut cleanly; a butcher's calf's or pig's trotter, or a well-reduced gelatinous veal stock, does much the same work.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350F/175C. With a crust on top and a long bake, a sheet of foil over the pastry for the last half hour prevents the top from colouring past the point where the filling is done.
- Quantities in old measuresA quarter of an Imperial pint is about 5 fl oz of stock, roughly two-thirds of a US cup. Two ounces of minced ham is roughly a third of a cup packed. Four ounces of breadcrumbs for the forcemeat is about two cups of fresh crumbs.
- "Half its bulk in fat"Veal kidney traditionally came encased in its own suet, and the instruction means roughly half as much fat as kidney by volume. Modern kidneys are sold trimmed; substitute chopped beef suet or fatty pork back fat, and expect a leaner, drier pie if you leave it out.
- Preparing the kidneysVeal kidney is multi-lobed; cut out the white core and gristle before slicing. Kidneys are often soaked in milk or acidulated water for half an hour to soften the ammoniacal note, something the book does not mention.
- The oyster forcemeatThe oysters go in raw and cook inside the pie over ninety minutes, which is fine; use fresh shucked oysters and their liquor, not smoked or canned. The unbeaten yolk is the only binder, so the balls are fragile and should be made small and firm.
- The crust"A good crust" is not specified. A sturdy short or hot-water paste will stand up better in a pie eaten cold than a flaky puff paste, which softens against the moist filling.
- Cooling and servingServe cold, as directed, and give the pie a full night in the refrigerator so the jelly sets. Sufficient for six to eight, as the original says.
- The priceThe cost still reads "Probable cost, 3s. 6s. 6d.", which cannot be right as it stands. It is most likely three shillings and sixpence in pre-decimal money.
Cassell's places this among the cold pies that Victorian households relied on for breakfast and luncheon, meals that are often said to have been laid out on a sideboard and eaten at whatever hour people appeared. Veal kidney is generally thought of as the choice of the well-off kitchen: milder and more tender than beef kidney, and it arrived from the butcher still wrapped in its own suet, which is why the recipe assumes fat is on hand rather than bought. The calf's foot is the older technique here, predating commercial powdered gelatine's general use in domestic kitchens; boiling feet for their set was standard practice for jellies both savoury and sweet. Oysters in the forcemeat mark the recipe as belonging to a period when oysters were cheap and treated as a seasoning rather than a luxury, a habit that faded in Britain as the beds were fished out through the later nineteenth century.