Fried Bread
Salt. Bacon. Skin the kidneys and cut them open, put them in a stewpan with the butter, ham, parsley, stock, and a little salt. Let them cook for five minutes, then dish them up on rounds of fried bread; reduce the gravy to one gill, strain it and pour it over them, serve with some nice little pieces of fried bacon round.
The heading and the ingredient list have come adrift in this book: the page is titled "Fried Bread" and opens with a fragment of a list ("Salt. Bacon."), but the method is plainly a dish of sautéed kidneys served on fried bread croûtes. Read it as such, and expect to supply your own quantities.
- The missing listOnly salt and bacon survive from the ingredients; the method also calls for butter, ham, parsley, and stock. No quantities are given anywhere on the page, so any figures are the modern cook's own: something on the order of 8 lamb kidneys, 2 oz butter, 2 oz finely chopped cooked ham and a tablespoon of parsley for four, with enough stock to allow a real reduction -- appreciably more than the gill it is to be boiled down to.
- Which kidneysThe recipe does not say, but the short cooking time points to lamb or veal kidneys rather than beef, which is coarse and needs long braising. Lamb kidneys want the thin membrane peeled off and the white core cut out with scissors after splitting.
- Five minutes is the pointKidneys go grey and rubbery the moment they pass medium; they should still be faintly pink at the centre. Cook them briefly over decent heat, lift them out onto the croûtes, and reduce the gravy afterwards rather than letting them sit in it.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. Reducing the pan liquid to that volume concentrates it into a sauce rather than a broth; strain it to catch the ham and any loose membrane.
- Rounds of fried breadCroûtes: crustless bread cut with a plain cutter slightly wider than a kidney half, fried in clarified butter until crisp on both sides and drained. Cut and fry them before the kidneys, since they hold for a few minutes and the kidneys do not.
- The baconSmall pieces or lardons of streaky bacon, fried separately until crisp and arranged round the dish. Frying it first and using some of the fat for the croûtes is the practical order.
- Yield and place in the mealTwo kidneys per person as an entrée course, one or two as a savoury or breakfast dish. Serve immediately; kidney sauce turns dull and the croûtes soften on standing.
Kidneys on fried bread belong to the Victorian and Edwardian repertoire of small hot dishes that could be sent up as an entrée, as a breakfast dish, or as the savoury at the close of dinner. Offal was cheap, cooked in minutes, and rich enough to carry a reduced stock sauce, which suited a kitchen brigade juggling many courses. The fried croûte is doing real work: it lifts the meat clear of the plate and absorbs the small quantity of concentrated gravy that would otherwise pool. The mangled state of this page — a title that does not match the dish, and an ingredient list cut off after two words — is a reminder that such books assumed a reader who already knew roughly what went into such a dish.