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Kidneys with Oysters
Remove skin from four lambs' kidneys. Cut in two lengthwise. Cook two tablespoons chopped onion, one shallot finely chopped, four tablespoons butter, one fourth teaspoon salt, and a few grains cayenne, together five minutes. Add one cup tomato. When hot, add one cup oysters. Keep hot while broiling kidneys. Arrange kidneys on platter and pour sauce over them. 1 pint milk cup sugar 3 tablespoons cornstarch 5 egg yolks Crême Frite 1 teaspoon salt 1-inch piece stick cinnamon 4 teaspoons butter 1 teaspoon vanilla few gratings lemon rind Mix yolks of eggs and sugar; moisten the cornstarch with small amount of cold milk, scald the remainder; add cornstarch mixture to scalded milk; cook twenty minutes; add egg mixture, butter, salt and seasonings, cook one minute. Pour into shallow buttered dish. Cool; cut in squares or diamonds; dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs; fry in deep fat.
Two recipes have run together here in the original typesetting: the kidney entrée ends at "pour sauce over them," and everything after that belongs to Crême Frite, a fried pastry cream. Treat them as separate dishes.
- The hinge: oysters go in last and barely cookAdd the shucked oysters to the hot tomato sauce and hold it off direct heat only until their edges ruffle, about two minutes. "Keep hot while broiling kidneys" will overshoot on a modern burner and leave them shrunken and rubbery.
- One cup tomatoIn a book of this period this most likely means canned tomato, pulp and juice together, unseasoned. A cup of drained canned crushed tomatoes is the closest match; fresh chopped tomato will need a few more minutes to lose its rawness.
- Skinning and coring the kidneysThe thin membrane peels off with the help of a paring knife tip. The book does not mention it, but also snip out the white core and gristle at the hinge, or the pieces will be chewy at the center.
- SoakingLamb kidneys from a modern butcher are mild, but 20 minutes in cold salted water or milk, then a rinse and thorough pat dry, removes any ammoniac edge. Dry surfaces are also what let them brown.
- BroilingCut side up under a broiler preheated 10 minutes, close to the element, roughly 3 minutes per side. Kidneys are best faintly pink at the center; cooked through they turn grainy. Skewering the halves flat keeps them from curling.
- Shallot and onionBoth are called for deliberately — the onion for body, the shallot for perfume. Five minutes in four tablespoons of butter over gentle heat should soften them without color.
- YieldFour kidneys, eight halves, enough for two as a main course or four as a small entree course; the recipe itself gives no yield. Toast points or fried bread under the kidneys catch the sauce.
- On the Crême Frite fragmentOn the Creme Frite fragment -- That second block is a stiff cornstarch pastry cream: milk scalded and thickened with cornstarch, then enriched with yolks, butter and the flavourings (cinnamon, lemon rind, vanilla) stirred in at the end, chilled firm in a shallow pan, then breaded and deep fried. The sugar quantity is lost in the original ("cup sugar"); assume about half a cup and taste before it sets.
Grilled kidneys were breakfast and supper food in the English tradition, and American cookbooks of the 1900s inherited them wholesale — the devilled kidney, the kidney on toast, the kidney with mushrooms. Pairing them with oysters belongs to the same late-Victorian habit that produced steak and oyster pie and oyster stuffing: oysters were cheap, abundant along the whole Atlantic seaboard, and used as a savory extender rather than a luxury. Maria Willett Howard compiled this book for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate firm, which explains the generous savory sections sitting alongside the cocoa recipes the volume was actually published to sell. The recipe's structure — a butter-and-tomato sauce built on onion and shallot, poured over broiled meat — is straight out of the French repertoire filtering into American domestic-science cooking at the time.