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Mushrooms and Kidneys
Split the kidneys, egg and bread-crumb them, and fry gently in butter for fifteen minutes. Put them on one side, and fry some mushrooms in the pan the kidneys were cooked in. Add salt and pepper to taste, and lay the mushrooms on a hot dish. Place half a kidney on each one, and serve garnished with mashed potatoes.
A late-Victorian breakfast or savoury dish, written with the assumption that the cook already knows how to dress a kidney. Two details need attention: the trimming, and the fifteen minutes.
- Which kidneyThe recipe does not say, but the dish only works with a small kidney: half of one has to sit on a mushroom cap, which points to sheep's (lamb's) kidney. Veal or pig's kidney is too large; if you use them, slice rather than halve.
- Trim before you crumbPeel off the thin membrane and snip out the white core and gristle at the hinge with scissors. Left in, it tightens as it cooks and the kidney curls off the pan.
- Fifteen minutes is too longFifteen minutes over even a gentle heat risks grey, granular meat. Egged and crumbed lamb kidney halves want roughly 3-4 minutes a side over medium heat, until the crumb is golden and the centre is faintly rosy.
- Egg and bread-crumbDry the kidneys well, dip in beaten egg, then in fine dry white crumbs (not the coarse fresh sort). Let them sit ten minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- The mushroomsLarge flat field or portobello caps, stalks removed, are what the recipe wants, since each has to carry half a kidney. Cook them gill-side up first so the juices collect, then turn.
- The panFrying the mushrooms in the kidney butter is the point of the dish; scrape up the browned crumb and let the mushrooms take it. Add a little more butter if the crumbs have drunk it all.
- ServingEverything cools fast, so warm the dish and the plates. Four lamb kidneys and eight caps serve four at breakfast or two as a supper dish, with the mashed potato piped or spooned round the edge.
Kidneys were breakfast food in the English country house and the club dining room, and Cassell's gives them several turns: grilled, devilled, in their own fat, or dressed up as here. The mushroom-and-kidney pairing belongs to the same family as steak and kidney pudding and the mixed grill, where offal supplied savour at a fraction of the price of a chop. Field mushrooms were a largely seasonal, largely gathered ingredient in Britain at the time, cultivation being generally said to have been small-scale, so a recipe calling for caps big enough to serve as platters is an autumn one. The egg-and-crumb treatment is standard nineteenth-century kitchen practice for anything small and lean that would otherwise dry in the pan, and it is applied here as much for the crisp coating as for protection.