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Skirts, Beef, to Stew, with Kidneys
An ox kidney, or a pig's kidneys, may be used for this dish. Take equal weights of kidney and beef skirts. Cut the kidneys into slices. Skin the skirts, and divide them into small square pieces. Fry both in beef dripping till they are equally and lightly browned. Drain them, and put them into a saucepan with as much stock as will cover them, a finely-minced onion, and a little pepper and salt. Simmer all very gently together till the meat is tender. Thicken the gravy with a little brown thickening; add a table-spoonful of any good store sauce, and serve. Two or three slices of bread, fried till crisp in the same fat as the meat, then cut into sippets and put round the dish, will be a great improvement. Time, one hour to simmer the meat. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A plain braise of two cheap cuts, and it stands or falls on the kidney: trimmed and browned properly it seasons the whole pan, left whole and underdone it makes the gravy bitter and ammoniac.
- Prepare the kidney firstHalve an ox kidney, cut out every trace of the white core and the fat surrounding it, then slice. A soak of 30 minutes in cold salted water or milk, drained and patted dry, takes the edge off the strong flavour. Pig's kidneys need only coring.
- What "skirts" meansBeef skirt is the diaphragm and flank muscle — what a modern butcher sells as thin skirt, thick skirt or hanger. Skin means pulling off the tough silverskin membrane on both sides, which will not soften in the pan.
- Simmering timeOne hour is optimistic for skirt cut into the small squares directed here. Expect 1½ to 2 hours at a bare tremble; the kidney will be done long before the beef, so judge by the beef and accept that the kidney gives up its flavour to the gravy.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian standby: flour cooked in butter or dripping until nut-brown, kept in a jar. Whisk a tablespoon of plain flour into an equal amount of the frying fat, cook it to the colour of milky coffee, then slacken with a ladle of the hot cooking liquid before stirring it back in.
- Store sauceAny bottled savoury sauce kept in the store cupboard — Worcestershire, mushroom ketchup, Harvey's. A tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce does exactly the job intended.
- Beef drippingStill the right fat here, and worth seeking out for the flavour it gives the fried bread. Lard or a neutral oil will brown the meat perfectly well but the sippets suffer.
- SippetsCrisp fried bread cut into small triangles or fingers, arranged round the edge of the dish. Fry them last, in the meat fat, and add them at the table or they go soft.
- YieldA pound each of skirt and kidney serves four generously with potatoes. The dish reheats better than most and is arguably improved the next day.
Cassell's includes this among the offal-and-cheap-cut recipes common to Victorian household cookery: skirt and ox kidney were among the less expensive things a butcher sold. The pairing is the same logic that produced steak and kidney pudding and pie emshowever a lean, well-flavoured muscle cut that needs long moist cooking, married to an organ meat that seasons the gravy far beyond its weight. Sippets, the fried bread border, are a device inherited from much older English cookery, where bread was the vehicle for sauce before potatoes became universal; by this period they had become largely decorative, a way of dressing a frugal stew for the dining room. The reliance on "any good store sauce" is equally of its period: the bottled sauces of the late nineteenth century, mushroom ketchup and its relations, were the standard shortcut to depth of flavour in a kitchen without stock cubes.