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Veal Kidney Stew
Trim 2 or 3 small veal kidneys and cut fine.
Put into a saucepan with I heaping tablespoonful of butter and stand over a hot fire, stirring occasionally, until lightly colored. Add I heaping tablespoonful of flour and slightly brown, then stir in ½ of a cupful of thick strained tomato, 1 tablespoonful of tomato catsup, IO drops of Worcestershire and ½ of a cupful of beef stock.
Stir and simmer for five minutes.
A quick sauté-and-deglaze dish that takes under fifteen minutes once the kidneys are trimmed. Note that the original's capital I's are the numeral 1, and "IO drops" is 10 drops.
- The hinge: keep the cooking shortKidney seizes and turns rubbery with prolonged heat. The five-minute simmer is not an underestimate — colour the pieces fast over high heat, then give the sauce only long enough to thicken and lose its raw flour taste.
- Trimming means more than trimmingVeal kidneys come lobed with a core of white fat and membrane running through them. Peel off the outer membrane, cut the lobes away from the central fat, and discard the tubes. "Cut fine" is not specified further, but it implies a small dice.
- Soak or notVeal kidney is mild compared with beef or pork and needs no long soaking, though a rinse in cold water and a thorough pat dry helps it brown rather than steam. Wet kidney will not colour.
- Thick strained tomatoThis is tomato purée or passata reduced to a heavy pulp — closer to modern passata cooked down, or canned tomato purée, than to tomato paste. Half a cupful of paste would be far too concentrated.
- Catsup then and nowPeriod tomato catsup was thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than today's. Modern ketchup brings noticeably more sugar; a single tablespoon is small enough not to unbalance the dish, but taste before adding more.
- Hot fireHigh heat in a wide skillet or sauté pan. Butter alone will brown at that temperature, so work quickly or add a little neutral oil to raise the smoke point.
- Seasoning is missingThe recipe names no salt or pepper. Season the kidneys before they go in the pan and correct the sauce at the end; commercial stock is usually salted, so taste before adding more.
- Sourcing and substitutionVeal kidney generally needs to be ordered from a butcher. Lamb kidneys are the closest widely available stand-in; halved and cored, several will be needed to match two or three veal kidneys, so judge by weight rather than count.
- Yield and servingTwo or three small kidneys with a cup of sauce serves two, or three at a stretch. Serve over buttered toast, boiled rice or plain noodles to take up the sauce.
Kidney belongs to the class of cheap protein that cookbooks of this kind existed to promote: nutritious, quick to cook, and priced well below a chop. Veal kidney was the aristocrat of the group, prized in French kitchens for its mildness and fine texture, and it turns up in American low-cost cookery as a way of putting something faintly luxurious on a table for very little money. The sauce is a period signature — flour browned in butter, then tomato, catsup and a few drops of Worcestershire, a formula that appears again and again in American cooking of the era, when bottled Worcestershire and commercial catsup were among the first shelf-stable flavourings a modest kitchen could count on having. The measurement in drops rather than dashes reflects how potent the sauce is.