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Kidneys and Mushrooms
Skin two sheep's kidneys, and cut them into small neat pieces. Melt an ounce of butter in a saucepan, and throw in about two dozen fresh button mushrooms and half a gill of stock. Simmer gently (on no account boil) for seven or eight minutes, and stir well. Throw in the prepared kidneys, and continue to simmer very gently until they are cooked. At the last moment add pepper and salt, half a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a glass of sherry. Serve hot.
A quick saucepan dish that lives or dies on restraint: the whole point of the instruction "on no account boil" is that kidney toughens the moment the liquid moves faster than a lazy shiver.
- Keep it below a boilHold the pan at a bare tremble, never letting it reach a boil, for the whole cooking. Lamb kidney passes from tender to rubbery within a minute or two of hard simmering, and no amount of further cooking brings it back.
- Sheep's kidneysThese are what a butcher now sells as lamb kidneys; two weigh roughly 4-5 oz together. Halve them lengthways, snip out the white core and gristle with scissors, then cut into pieces about the size of a walnut half.
- Half a gill of stockIn British measure a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz (70 ml). It is a small amount deliberately: the mushrooms give up their own liquid and the sauce should stay short and glossy, not soupy.
- A glass of sherryA wine glass in period recipe usage is usually reckoned at about 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz (60-70 ml). Dry or medium sherry suits kidneys better than cream sherry. Added at the end it stays sharp and aromatic; simmered on, it turns flat.
- Two dozen button mushroomsSmall whole buttons, about 6 oz, left whole. If yours are larger, quarter them so they cook in the same seven or eight minutes rather than shedding water later.
- Timing for the kidneysThree to five minutes at a bare simmer is enough for pieces this size; they should be faintly pink at the centre and firm, not squeaky. Cut one open to check rather than trusting the clock.
- Season last, as writtenSalt added early is often said to draw moisture from kidney and firm it. The recipe's order is sound: pepper, salt, parsley and sherry all go in at the finish, off or nearly off the heat.
- YieldServes two as a light supper or breakfast dish, four as a savoury. Traditionally spooned over buttered toast or into a border of rice, which catches the small quantity of sauce.
Kidneys were breakfast and supper food in the nineteenth-century British household rather than dinner-party fare: cheap, quick, and sold in every butcher's shop, they turned up devilled, grilled on a skewer, or stewed in a little wine like this. The insistence on gentle heat reflects a genuine piece of kitchen knowledge, that offal and mushrooms both suffer from a rolling boil. Sherry in a small savoury pan sauce was common in English kitchens of the period, where cooking sherry and mushroom ketchup did much of the work that stock reductions do now. The dish belongs to the same family as the devilled kidneys and kidney toasts that filled Edwardian breakfast sideboards.