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Pork Kidney, Stewed
Pork kidneys may be fried as directed for mutton kidneys, or they may be served as follows. Take off the skin, and cut two kidneys into slices a quarter of an inch thick. Season with pepper and salt, and sprinkle over them equal parts of parsley and finely-minced shallot. Fry in butter until they are lightly browned, stir a tea-spoonful of flour amongst them, and shake them well in the pan. Add gradually a wine-glassful of gravy, or even water, and half a wine-glassful of light wine. Bring the sauce to the point of boiling. Take out the kidney. Mix a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley with the sauce, let it boil two minutes longer, pour it over the kidney, and serve very hot. Time altogether, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, pork kidneys, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient for two persons.
A quick sauté-and-deglaze dish that reads oddly only because of its Victorian measures. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes and serves two.
- The hinge: get the kidney out of the panThe recipe removes the kidney before the sauce finishes reducing, and that is the entire technique. Slices a quarter-inch thick need only two to three minutes over decent heat; left in while the sauce boils down they turn grainy and rubbery.
- Soak and trim firstBeyond removing the skin, cut out the pale core and any tubing from the centre of each slice — pork kidney is stronger-flavoured than mutton, and the core holds most of the ammoniac tang. Half an hour in cold salted water or milk, then patted dry, mellows it considerably.
- A wine-glassfulReckon roughly 2 fl oz (60 ml) for a Victorian wine glass, so about 1/4 cup of stock and 2 tablespoons of wine. These are not precise measures; adjust to get a sauce that coats.
- "Gravy" means stockIn Victorian cookery writing gravy of this kind usually means a brown meat stock kept in the larder rather than a thickened sauce; beef or veal stock will serve. "Light wine" most likely means a dry white, or a light red, rather than a fortified wine.
- Pork, not mutton, on donenessLamb and mutton kidneys are often served pink; pork offal should be cooked through. Thin slices reach that in the couple of minutes given, so there is no conflict — just do not serve them translucent in the middle.
- Shallot and parsley twice overThe shallot and parsley go in with the kidney and take on colour in the butter; a further teaspoonful of parsley goes into the sauce raw at the end. Keep that finishing spoonful back rather than adding all the herbs at once.
- The flourA teaspoon of flour stirred into the buttery pan is a small roux. Shake it about for thirty seconds or so before liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- ServingEnough for two as a lunch or breakfast dish. Sippets of fried bread, toast or mashed potato catch the sauce, which is scant by design.
Kidneys were breakfast and supper food in nineteenth-century England, cheap enough that Cassell's quotes a pork kidney at fourpence to eightpence apiece — pennies against the shillings a joint would cost. The pattern here is one often seen in Victorian treatments of small offal: season, fry hard in butter, dust with flour, deglaze with stock and a little wine, and finish with parsley. Pork kidney was generally reckoned below mutton kidney, being coarser and stronger, and the entry begins by referring the reader back to the mutton recipe before offering this more heavily seasoned alternative with shallot and wine to carry the flavour. Encyclopaedic works like Cassell's made a point of covering every edible part of the animal.