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Kidneys, Curried
Skin two sheep's kidneys, wash them, and slice them very finely. Put one ounce of butter into a frying-pan, and when quite hot throw in the kidneys. Stir them over a sharp fire for three minutes, take them off, add a dessert-spoonful of curry paste and a pinch of salt. Mix well together, and serve up on toast.
A breakfast savoury of the plainest kind: two kidneys, a hot pan, three minutes. Almost everything depends on how thinly you slice and how hot the pan is.
- The hinge: heat and speedKidney toughens the moment it goes past done, and "a sharp fire" means the pan must be properly hot before the meat touches it. Thin slices over high heat need two to three minutes and no more; they should be browned outside and just barely pink within.
- Sheep's kidneysLamb kidneys are the modern equivalent, available from butchers and sometimes still in their suet. Two of them weigh roughly 3-4 oz (85-110 g) in total, so this feeds one person generously or two at a pinch.
- Skinning and coringThe recipe says skin and wash but not core. Peel off the fine membrane, then cut out the white gristly knot at the centre with the point of a knife, or it will stay chewy however briefly you cook it.
- SoakingSome cooks steep kidneys in cold salted water or milk for 20-30 minutes before cooking to soften the ammoniacal smell. Pat them thoroughly dry afterwards, or they will steam rather than brown.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, about 10 ml. Curry paste in this period was usually bought ready-made, though household recipes for it also exist; commercial pastes generally worked spices into oil and vinegar, often with tamarind. Jarred curry pastes of the Anglo-Indian type are the closest match. A hot Indian cooking paste is a different and much stronger thing; use less and taste.
- Why the paste goes in off the heatThe recipe is explicit that the pan comes off before the paste goes in. Curry paste can scorch in a hot dry pan, and the residual heat is enough to let it dissolve into the butter and kidney juices.
- ServingThe recipe says only 'on toast'. Any juice left in the pan is worth scraping out over the top; it carries most of the seasoning.
Curried and devilled kidneys belong to the Victorian breakfast sideboard, where hot savouries stood in chafing dishes alongside the bacon and the kedgeree. The dish reflects a household taste for Indian flavours filtered through the bottled condiment trade: by this date ready-made curry paste and curry powder were common grocery items in Britain, and recipes often called for a spoonful of paste rather than a list of spices. Kidneys suited the format because they were cheap, sold by the pair, and cooked in a few minutes. Offal at breakfast survived in Britain well into the twentieth century before retreating to the hotel grill room.