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Kidneys En Casserole
3 sheep's kidneys 2 eggs 3 ozs. (1/2 cup) chopped 1 tablespoonful chopped parssuet 1/2 lb. (2 cups) bread crumbs 1/2 pint (I cup) milk ley 1 teaspoonful powdered herbs Salt and pepper Skin and chop the kidneys, put them into a basin with the suet, bread crumbs, milk, eggs well beaten, parsley, herbs, and seasonings.
Mix well, turn into a buttered earthenware bowl, cover with a buttered paper, and steam for one hour. Serve hot with brown sauce or good gravy.
This is a steamed kidney pudding rather than a baked dish, and the hinge is gentle, unbroken steam for the full hour — a bare simmer under the bowl, topped up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Sheep's kidneysSold now as lamb kidneys, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 oz each, so three gives about 6 to 8 oz of meat. Peel off the membrane, halve them and cut out the white core and any fat before chopping; the core is what makes kidney taste acrid.
- SuetBeef suet, 3 oz shredded fine, or packaged shredded suet from the baking aisle. Frozen grated butter works if suet is unavailable, though the texture will be slightly denser.
- BreadcrumbsThe book equates 1/2 lb with 2 cups, a ratio that points to drier crumbs rather than fresh soft ones; if you use fresh crumbs from a stale loaf you will need proportionally more by volume. Fine dry crumbs sold for coating absorb the milk more aggressively and give a heavier, closer pudding.
- The half pintThe book equates its half pint with one cup. Use a scant cup of milk to start and add a spoonful more only if the mixture will not fall off the spoon.
- Powdered herbsDried mixed herbs, ground fine; thyme, marjoram and a little sage are a plausible reading. A teaspoon of dried thyme and marjoram together is close enough.
- The vessel and its coverA pudding basin or earthenware bowl large enough to leave the mixture no more than three-quarters up the sides, buttered. Buttered paper alone lets condensation in; use buttered parchment with foil over it, tied or crimped tightly at the rim.
- Steaming setupStand the bowl on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, add boiling water to halfway up the sides, cover and keep at a low simmer. Check the water level at the half hour.
- Doneness and yieldOne hour sets the custard-and-crumb base and cooks the kidney through; the centre should read 165F. The quantities suggest something in the region of three or four helpings, though the recipe gives no yield.
Steamed savoury puddings of this kind were a fixture of British cooking well before the casserole vogue that gave this book its title, and the recipe is really a small basin pudding wearing a French name — the "casserole" here is simply the earthenware vessel, which was sold in the early twentieth century as a fireproof, oven-and-steamer alternative to metal. Kidneys were cheap offal, and binding a few of them with suet, crumbs and milk stretched a shilling's worth of meat to feed a family, much as a stuffing or forcemeat does. Sheep's kidneys in particular were the everyday sort in Britain, smaller and milder than ox kidney and not needing the long braise the latter demands, which is why an hour's steaming suffices. The brown sauce or gravy at the end is not garnish: the pudding is deliberately plain and depends on it.