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Veal Kidney Cakes
Take a cold veal kidney, mince finely both fat and lean, and mix therewith an equal weight of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Season rather highly with pepper and salt, and bind the mixture together with the yolk of a well-beaten egg. Form it into cakes, dip these into melted butter, and afterwards into finely-grated bread-crumbs, and fry them in a little hot butter or lard till brightly browned. Drain the fat from them before serving, and arrange neatly on a dish garnished with parsley. Send good brown sauce to table in a tureen. Time to fry the cakes, about ten minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A leftovers dish from the era when a roast loin of veal came to the table with its kidney and surrounding fat still attached. Everything hinges on that word cold: this is a re-use recipe, not a way of cooking raw kidney.
- Start with cooked kidney"A cold veal kidney" means one already cooked, most likely left over from a roast joint, and allowed to go cold. Ten minutes of frying will brown a cake but will not reliably cook raw kidney through; if you are starting from a raw kidney, roast or poach it first and chill it before mincing.
- Sourcing the kidneyVeal kidney is a butcher's order in most places now. A whole veal kidney runs roughly 8-12 oz with its suet; lamb kidneys are the closest easy substitute in flavour, though milder and much smaller, and they carry little of their own fat.
- Fat and lean in equal measureThe instruction to mince "both fat and lean" is not incidental. The suet is what keeps the cakes from drying, and if your kidney comes trimmed bare you should add a couple of ounces of beef suet or minced fatty bacon to compensate.
- Equal weight of crumbsWeight for weight, the mixture is half bread; by volume, crumbs being far bulkier, considerably more than half. Use soft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged ones, or the cakes turn to sawdust. If the mix will not hold, a spoonful of stock or cream loosens it without adding more egg.
- One yolk, not moreThe recipe binds with the yolk alone. Adding the white as well is generally thought to firm the cakes unpleasantly; if the mixture is too slack to shape, chill it for half an hour rather than adding another egg.
- FryingButter alone browns and burns before ten minutes are up. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half lard or a neutral oil, over medium heat, and turn the cakes once. Cakes of about 2 in across and 3/4 in thick will take the stated time; larger ones will colour before the centre is hot.
- Brown sauceThe "good brown sauce" called for here would have been an espagnole or a plain reduced brown gravy made from veal or beef bones. A well-made pan gravy finished with a little Madeira serves the same purpose.
- Yield and costSixpence reflects the low price of an offcut. The recipe gives two or three portions, a breakfast or luncheon dish rather than a dinner course.
Cassell's belongs to a tradition of British household cookery in which nothing off a joint was thrown away, and the veal kidney was a particular prize: it roasts inside the loin, wrapped in its own pale suet. Rechauffe cookery of this kind - cold cooked meat minced, bound, crumbed and fried - fills a large part of every Victorian dictionary of cookery, and the pattern here is the same one used for rissoles, croquettes and cutlets of every leftover imaginable. The published "probable cost" of sixpence is a standard feature of Cassell's, aimed at mistresses budgeting a household and checking a cook's accounts. Veal itself was far more common on English tables then than now, and its kidney was often said to be prized for its mildness and its abundant, delicately flavoured fat, a preference still visible in French cooking, where rognon de veau remains the kidney of choice.