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VEAL KIDNEY (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Cut a veal kidney in half lengthwise. Season the pieces with salt and pepper, dip them in clarified butter, and afterwards in bread-crumbs, and broil until sufficiently cooked. Put two ounces of fresh butter on a plate, and with the point of a knife work well into it a dessert-spoonful of finely-minced parsley, a pinch of salt, another of pepper, and four or five drops of strained lemon-juice. Continue working these ingredients until the mixture is of the consistency of thick cream. When thoroughly mixed, put the butter on a hot dish, place the broiled kidney upon it, and serve. Time, seven or eight minutes to broil the veal kidney; three or four minutes to mix the sauce. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for one person.
A single-serving grill with a compound butter, and the whole thing turns on getting the kidney off the heat while it is still faintly pink. Overcooked kidney turns granular and ammoniac, and no amount of parsley butter rescues it.
- Buy and trim it yourselfVeal kidney usually arrives buried in a jacket of hard suet. Peel that away, split the kidney lengthwise, and cut out the white gristly core at the centre with the point of a knife; the book assumes you know this. A veal kidney is a substantial piece, commonly half a pound or more, which is consistent with "sufficient for one person" as a main.
- "Broil" means grillIn a British book of this period broiling is cooking under or over direct radiant heat, i.e. grilling. Use a very hot grill or a ridged pan, high heat throughout. Seven or eight minutes total, turned once, is about right for halves of an average kidney; go by feel, aiming for a rosy centre.
- Clarified butter, and whyThe butter is clarified so the milk solids do not scorch and blacken the crumbs under fierce heat. Melt butter gently, skim the foam, pour off the clear fat and leave the milky sediment behind. Plain melted butter will burn.
- Dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about two teaspoons. Two ounces of butter is four tablespoons, a generous amount for one kidney but the point is a pool of sauce on the plate.
- Working the butterThe butter must be soft but not melted, and worked until it is pale and creamy so the parsley and lemon are suspended rather than sitting in liquid. Add the lemon juice last and a few drops at a time, or the butter splits.
- The hot dish mattersThe compound butter is not cooked; it melts under the kidney to become the sauce. A cold plate leaves you with a lump of butter and dry meat. Warm the dish, and carve the kidney at the table so the juices run into the butter.
- Probable costTenpence in old pence, from the era when offal was cheap protein. It signals that this was a modest supper dish, not a luxury.
A la maitre d'hotel refers to the household steward, the master of the household staff, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into a fixed meaning in professional kitchens: butter worked cold with chopped parsley, salt, pepper and lemon juice, set on the plate to melt under grilled meat or fish. It is the simplest of the compound butters catalogued in French kitchen practice and the one most often used for grills, where there is no pan of juices to make a sauce from. The dish brings together two techniques at once: crumbing with clarified butter to protect food under a fierce grill, and building an uncooked butter sauce. Veal kidney's presence at tenpence is a reminder that offal was everyday eating in British households of the period, and that a butcher then sold kidneys still wrapped in their suet, which the cook is often said to have rendered and used elsewhere rather than discarded.