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Mushroom Pot Pourri
Cut in slices one lamb's kidney. Sauté in melted butter. Remove from butter, and sauté twelve mushrooms, cleaned and cut in slices. Melt two tablespoons butter; add two tablespoons flour, one and one half cups tomato, few drops of onion juice, one and one half teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce, one half teaspoon salt, and few grains pepper. Cook ten minutes; add mushrooms and kidney, and cook until kidney is tender.
Serve in center of hot platter, and garnish with hot cooked rice or with macaroni with Cream Sauce.
Sweetbreads, chicken, or veal may be substituted for kidney, but make a much more expensive dish.
A quick sauté of kidney and mushrooms bound in a tomato roux — essentially a devilled kidney with the heat dialled down. Two things decide whether it works: how the kidney is trimmed and how briefly it is cooked.
- The hinge: do not cook the kidney long"Cook until kidney is tender" is misleading — lamb kidney is tender when barely done and turns rubbery and grainy within a few minutes of that. Sauté the slices a minute or two per side, then return them to the finished sauce only long enough to heat through, three or four minutes at most.
- Trimming the kidneyHalve it lengthwise and cut out the white core and any membrane with scissors or a small knife; the recipe assumes a cook who knew to do this. A 30-minute soak in cold salted water or milk softens the ammoniac edge some people object to. One lamb's kidney is small — around 2 oz — so scale up if feeding more than two.
- "One and one half cups tomato"In 1907 this means canned tomatoes, pulp and juice together, or fresh tomatoes stewed and passed through a sieve. Canned crushed tomatoes are the closest match; passata is smoother but works. Not tomato paste and not ketchup.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without visible pieces: a halved onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth. A teaspoon of grated onion or a small pinch of onion powder gives the same result.
- Twelve mushroomsThe count suggests small buttons rather than large flats, so perhaps 4 to 6 oz in total; adjust to taste. Slice them and sauté hard in the kidney butter so they colour rather than steam; they will give off liquid that should cook away before the sauce is built.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour into a cup and a half of tomato gives a light to medium binding rather than a thick one. Cook the roux a minute before the tomato goes in, and stir well -- tomato acid can make a flour-thickened sauce catch on the pan bottom during its ten minutes.
- Yield and servingAs written this serves two as an entrée, or four in the period sense of a small course between others. "Serve in center of hot platter" implies the rice or macaroni is arranged around the edge, and with only one kidney it will carry much of the bulk.
- The substitutionsSweetbreads need blanching, trimming and pressing before they go anywhere near a pan, so the swap is not like-for-like. Cooked chicken or veal should be diced and added at the very end, since it only needs warming.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and published in 1907 — a promotional cookbook in the mould of the era, padded well beyond confectionery into a full domestic manual. "Pot pourri" here is used in its older French sense of a mixed or miscellaneous stew, not the bowl of dried petals; the name signals a dish assembled from odds and ends rather than one with a fixed pedigree. The economics stated in the last line are the real point: lamb kidney was among the cheapest meats on the block, and the recipe exists to show that a tomato sauce, mushrooms and Worcestershire could carry offal onto a platter respectable enough for the entrée course. Worcestershire itself was by 1907 a fixture of American middle-class cooking, the standard bottled means of making cheap meat taste emphatic.]</json>