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KIDNEYS (a la Tartare)
Broil five or six kidneys. Put them on a hot dish, and serve the following sauce with them, which should be prepared before the kidneys are put on to broil. Beat the yolk of an egg for two or three minutes. Add very gradually, in drops at first, six tea-spoonfuls of oil, and then one of tarragon vinegar. Beat the mixture well between every addition, or the oil will float on the top. Repeat until the sauce is of the consistency of thick cream. Four table-spoonfuls of oil, and one of vinegar, will be about the quantity required. Add a pinch of salt, a small pinch of cayenne pepper, a table-spoonful of unmixed French mustard, five or six gherkins, and three shallots, finely minced, a tea-spoonful each of chopped chervil, tarragon, and burnet, and half a tea-spoonful of chilli vinegar. Put a tea-spoonful of this sauce in the hollow of each kidney, and send the rest to table in a tureen. Time, six minutes to broil the kidney; about three-quarters of an hour to prepare the sauce. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 3d. each.
Two things happening at once here: a fast grill and a hand-beaten mayonnaise. The sauce is the work, and the book is right to say make it first.
- Which kidneysUnspecified in the original, but the price and the quantity for four or five people point to sheep's (lamb's) kidneys, the usual broiling kidney. Ask the butcher for them still in their suet if possible; strip the membrane, halve them lengthwise without cutting through, and snip out the white core with scissors.
- Broil means grillIn a Victorian British kitchen this is a gridiron over open coals. Use an overhead grill at its highest setting or a ridged pan over high heat, cut side first. Six minutes is right for lamb's kidneys and gives them a faint pink centre; push them to well done and they turn grainy and bitter.
- Keep them flatKidneys curl violently as they cook. Run two skewers crosswise through the split halves to hold them open, which also preserves the hollow the sauce is spooned into.
- The oil quantitiesThe recipe gives two figures because it is describing a process and then a total: begin with six teaspoons added drop by drop, and carry on to roughly four tablespoons (about 60 ml) of oil against one tablespoon of tarragon vinegar. Use a neutral oil or a mild olive oil, not a peppery extra virgin.
- Three-quarters of an hourThat is the timing for building an emulsion by hand with a fork or small whisk, and it is honest. A bowl and balloon whisk will do it in five to ten minutes, an immersion blender in under a minute. The warning about adding oil in drops at first still applies whatever the tool.
- Unmixed French mustardFrench mustard was sold ready-made as a paste, unlike English mustard powder mixed with water at home; 'unmixed' here most likely signals plain mustard without added flavourings, though the phrase is ambiguous. A plain Dijon is the usual modern stand-in, a level tablespoon.
- Burnet and chilli vinegarSalad burnet is a cucumber-scented herb now rare outside herb gardens; a little extra chervil with a scrap of cucumber peel covers the gap, or simply leave it out. Chilli vinegar was chillies, fresh or dried, steeped in vinegar; half a teaspoon of a plain hot pepper sauce or vinegar with a pinch of chilli flakes stands in.
- Raw eggThe sauce is an uncooked mayonnaise. It is ordinary kitchen practice, but use the freshest eggs you can, keep the finished sauce cold, and use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- YieldFour to five as a savoury or breakfast dish, as stated. The sauce makes considerably more than the kidneys need; it keeps two or three days refrigerated and is good with cold meat or fried fish.
À la tartare in nineteenth-century cookery meant one of two related things: meat grilled with mustard and crumbs, or anything served with sauce tartare, the cold mustard-and-herb mayonnaise that this recipe builds from scratch. The name is generally traced to the French vogue for calling fiercely seasoned dishes Tartar, after the steppe horsemen of European imagination, rather than to any Central Asian cooking. The sauce here is close to what French kitchens of the period called rémoulade — gherkins, shallots, and the fine herbs chervil, tarragon and burnet — and shows how blurred the two names were before Escoffier's codifications settled them. Grilled kidneys themselves were a fixture of the British breakfast sideboard and the late-evening savoury, cheap, quick over coals, and strongly flavoured enough to carry a sauce this assertive. The entry doubles as a lesson in emulsion: the instruction to add oil in drops and beat between every addition is the whole of mayonnaise technique in two sentences.