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Salt and Pepper (Skin the kidney and cut up)
Skin the kidney and cut up into thin slices, break the eggs into a basin, beat well and season with a pinch of white pepper and salt, and add the chopped parsley. Put half the butter in an omelet-pan; when hot add the chopped shalot, fry a little, add the kidney, and sauté for a few seconds. Put the remainder of the butter in another omelet-pan; when hot put in the eggmixture, and proceed the same as for Savoury Omelet. When set and ready for folding, put the stewed kidney in the centre fold, turn on a dish, and serve with a tablespoonful of hot demi-glace sauce poured round the omelet.
This is a kidney omelette from the era when a professional kitchen ran on a standing stock of demi-glace and a cook was expected to know the master recipe for a savoury omelet by heart. The page as printed gives no ingredient list, so the proportions have to be supplied.
- Missing quantitiesNo quantities appear with the method as printed here, so amounts have to be supplied. For one omelette, work from 3 eggs, 1 lamb's kidney or half a veal kidney, about 1 oz butter split between the two pans, 1 small shallot and a teaspoon of chopped parsley.
- "Shalot"An older spelling of shallot. One small one, finely chopped, is enough; it is there for sweetness behind the kidney, not for bulk.
- Which kidneyLamb's kidney is the usual choice and needs only skinning and halving to remove the white core. Veal kidney is milder and larger; ox kidney is too strong and too tough for a few seconds in a pan.
- Timing on the kidney"Sauté for a few seconds" is optimistic for anything but paper-thin slices. Cut them 3-4 mm and give them about 90 seconds over good heat, until browned outside and just faintly rosy within. Past that point kidney turns grainy and releases liquid that will wet the omelette.
- Two pansThe method deliberately keeps the kidney out of the egg pan so the omelette surface stays clean and the browned butter and kidney juices do not scorch. It is worth following rather than consolidating into one pan.
- An omelet-panA shallow pan with sloping sides, 8 inches across for three eggs. Non-stick is a fair substitute; the point of the original was a pan reserved for eggs and never scoured.
- "Proceed the same as for Savoury Omelet"That is: pour into foaming butter, stir briskly with the flat of a fork while shaking the pan, stop while the centre is still loose, then fold and roll out onto the dish. The residual heat finishes it.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown sauce built on veal stock and espagnole. A good shop-bought veal or beef demi-glace, or a strong reduced brown stock with a spoonful of Madeira, gives the same effect. One tablespoon poured in a ribbon around the omelette, never over it.
- YieldOne omelette, one person, as a breakfast or luncheon dish. Kidney omelettes do not scale into a large pan; make them one at a time.
Kidney and eggs were a fixture of the British breakfast and luncheon table through the nineteenth century, and the omelette was the polite way to serve offal in a small quantity to a single diner. The construction here is characteristically Anglo-French of the high-class cookery school: an English savoury filling handled by French method, finished with a spoonful of demi-glace from the sauce stockpot that any large kitchen kept going. The cross-reference to "Savoury Omelet" is also typical of the genre: the base method was given once and the variations, kidney among them, followed as brief notes.