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Lemon-juice (Half a pint of Brown Italian)
Half a pint of Brown Italian Sauce.
Small Quenelles or Mushrooms to garnish.
Split the kidneys, remove the white skin, and sauté them with the butter, onion, mushrooms, lemon-juice, and a little pepper and salt. Butter eight small oval moulds, and line them with the quenelle meat. Place half a kidney in each, and steam slowly for twenty minutes. Turn out carefully. Pour the Italian sauce over, and garnish with the quenelles or mushrooms.
K2
A late-Victorian entrée of lambs' kidneys encased in forcemeat, steamed in dariole or oval moulds and sauced. The technique is straightforward; the vocabulary is what dates it.
- Quenelle meatThis is a pounded forcemeat — traditionally veal or chicken breast worked with panada, egg white and cream until smooth. A food processor does in two minutes what a mortar did in twenty; keep everything cold or the mixture will split. The recipe does not say how much you need; enough to line eight small moulds and cover the kidney in each.
- Brown Italian sauceSauce italienne: a brown sauce (espagnole or a well-reduced demi-glace) finished with duxelles of mushroom and shallot, white wine and chopped herbs. Half a pint is about 1 1/4 cups in US measure, enough to nap eight moulds lightly.
- The kidneysLambs' kidneys are the likely intention, though the recipe does not say: four kidneys, split, give the eight halves. Strip the membrane and cut out the white core with scissors. Ox kidney would be coarser and stronger than this treatment suggests.
- Sauté brieflyThe kidneys are only sealed at this stage, not cooked through; they finish in the steam. A minute or so per side in hot butter is plenty. Kidney that is fully cooked twice turns grainy and hard.
- MouldsSmall oval or dariole moulds; the recipe specifies no capacity beyond 'small'. Butter them well and, if you want a clean turn-out, line the base with a disc of buttered parchment. Ramekins work, though the shape is less elegant.
- SteamingTwenty minutes at a gentle steam is right — the forcemeat should be just set and springy. A hard rolling steam makes the quenelle mixture puff and then collapse when turned out.
- GarnishThe small quenelles are poached separately in simmering stock, dropped from two teaspoons; button mushrooms turned or simply sautéed in butter serve as well.
- YieldEight moulds, so eight portions as an entrée in the old service, or four as a modern main course.
In the graded menus of the period an entrée was a made dish served after the fish and before the roast, and it was expected to be small, hot and highly finished — which is exactly what a kidney sealed in forcemeat and turned out of a mould delivers. The forcemeat itself, called quenelle meat, was the mark of a trained kitchen: pounding veal or chicken to a paste smooth enough to hold its shape when steamed was slow, exacting work. Sauce italienne belongs to French classical practice rather than to Italian cookery, though how it came by the name is not settled; the defining element is the duxelles of finely chopped mushroom and shallot cooked down to a near-dry paste before the brown sauce goes in. Offal held a respectable place on such menus — kidneys were cheap, quick to cook and prized for their flavour, and dressing them in this way turned a humble cut into something fit for the middle of a formal dinner.