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Pepper and Salt (Cut up the kidneys)
Cut up the kidneys and the beef into small dice, season with pepper and salt, add the onion chopped up and some parsley, sauté all these for about ten minutes in the butter; pour off the grease, add the stock and rice, and boil till quite tender, then strain; pound all the meat and rice in a mortar, then pass through a tammy or fine hair-sieve; stir this into the stock again, make it very hot and serve.
The soup must not boil after it has been passed through the tammy.
A Victorian purée-style kidney soup, printed here as method only — the quantities lived in the heading, which has been lost in this excerpt. Everything below assumes you are supplying your own proportions.
- No quantities surviveThe verbatim text gives no weights or volumes. For a purée soup of this type, roughly 1 lb ox or lamb kidney, 8 oz lean beef, one onion, 2 oz butter, 3 oz rice and 3 pints stock is in the right range, but that is a reconstruction, not the original figures.
- The hinge: do not boil at the endOnce the meat and rice have gone through the sieve, the soup is a suspension of pounded protein and starch. Boiling makes it curdle and separate, and the kidney turns granular. Bring it just to steaming and serve.
- TammyA tammy is a worsted or fine-woven cloth through which thick soups were wrung, often by two people twisting opposite ends. A food mill followed by a fine-mesh sieve does much the same job; a blender then a sieve is faster and will give a very smooth result.
- Kidney preparationOx kidney needs the white core and surrounding fat cut out entirely, and a soak in cold salted water or milk for an hour will pull out some of the ammoniacal smell. The book takes this knowledge for granted.
- Pour off the greaseThis is not fussiness. Kidney and beef in butter throw a lot of fat, and any left in will not emulsify into a sieved soup — it floats in visible slicks.
- The rice is the thickenerThere is no roux and no cream. The rice is boiled to collapse and then pounded, which is what gives the soup body. Use a starchy short or medium grain rather than basmati.
- Boil till quite tenderCut small as the recipe directs, the kidney and beef should be tender well within the hour at a gentle simmer; test from about 30 minutes. By that point the rice will have gone to mush, which is the intention here, so do not add it late.
- YieldAt the proportions above, six moderate first-course servings. Season again after sieving; pounding and straining flatten the salt noticeably.
Kidney soup was a fixture of British hotel and household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and books of this kind — collections of "high class" recipes aimed at cooks in service and at cookery-school pupils — commonly carried one. The method here belongs to the older family of pounded soups: before sieves of drawn wire were cheap and before mechanical mincers were common in domestic kitchens, smoothness was achieved by long work in a mortar followed by forcing the pulp through a tammy cloth, a two-person job that made purée soups a marker of a well-staffed kitchen. Rice as the thickening agent rather than flour is characteristic of the period's better practice. That the recipe survives as method without quantities is itself typical of these books, which appear to have printed ingredient lists as headings and expected the reader to have the whole page in front of her.