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Kidney Soup
Cut an ox kidney into thin slices. Season these with salt and pepper, dredge a little flour over them, and fry them in butter until they are nicely browned. Pour over them as much boiling water as will cover them, and simmer gently for an hour. Take out the kidney, cut it into small pieces, and return it to the saucepan, together with two quarts of stock, two turnips, two carrots, one onion, three sticks of celery, all cut small, and a small bunch of savoury herbs. Simmer slowly for an hour and a half, then take out the herbs; add a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a little salt and pepper, if required, and thicken the soup with a lump of butter rolled in flour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per quart. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A Victorian brown soup built on offal and long simmering; the method is sound, but a few of the ingredients and quantities need translating.
- Ox kidneyBeef kidney; something in the region of 1–1.5 lb suits this quantity. Soak it in cold water or milk for an hour, and cut away the hard white core and any fat before slicing — the core is gristly and is commonly blamed for the strong smell people object to.
- Two quarts of stockAbout 2.3 litres (four imperial pints). Use a light beef or veal stock; the recipe already gets plenty of body from the kidney's own frying liquor, so a heavily reduced commercial concentrate will make it salty and flat.
- The hinge: brown it properly, then keep the heat lowMuch of the colour and depth of the finished soup comes from the initial fry, so get real browning on the floured slices in batches rather than crowding the pan. After that, everything is a bare simmer — kidney boiled hard turns granular and tough.
- Two separate simmersAn hour in water, then an hour and a half in stock, is a long total cook and is deliberate: it is what makes the kidney tender rather than rubbery. It is not a misprint, though 45 minutes for the second stage is enough if your vegetables are cut small and you prefer them intact.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom brine, not the tomato condiment. Bottled versions still exist; a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce or a teaspoon of soy plus a little mushroom soaking liquid gives a similar savoury lift.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre manié — roughly 1 oz butter kneaded with 1 oz flour. Drop it in in small pieces off the boil, whisking, then return to a simmer for two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Savoury herbsA bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf. Tie it with string so retrieving it at the end is not an excavation.
- Yield and servingSix servings, as the recipe states. Some period recipes for kidney soup direct that it be rubbed through a sieve for a smoother result; left chunky it eats more like a stew, and a slice of toast or a spoonful of sherry at the table is not out of keeping.
Kidney soup belongs to the thrifty end of Victorian cookery, where offal was cheap, plentiful and expected on the table rather than tolerated. The costing of 1s. 6d. per quart, in a form generally associated with Cassell's, marks it as an economical dish, and the two-stage method — fry, simmer in water, then build with stock — is one nineteenth-century way of extracting flavour from a strong-tasting cut while taming it. The recipe's near relation is steak and kidney pudding; both rely on the distinctive iron-and-malt savour of beef kidney. Mushroom ketchup, called for here almost as an afterthought, was the workhorse seasoning of British kitchens before bottled tomato sauce and commercial stock cubes displaced it, and its presence dates this style of soup as clearly as the price does.