Home › B › Beef Kidney, To Dress (INGREDIENTS for dish)
Beef Kidney, to Dress (INGREDIENTS for dish)
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-1 kidney, clarified butter, pepper and salt to taste, a small quantity of highly-seasoned gravy, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 1/4 teaspoonful of powdered sugar. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Cut the kidney into neat slices, put them into warm water to soak for 2 hours, and change the water 2 or 3 times; then lay them on a clean cloth to dry the water from them, place them in a frying-pan with some clarified butter, and fry them of a nice brown; season each side with pepper and salt, put them round the dish with the gravy in the middle. Before pouring BEEF KIDNEY. the gravy in the dish, add the lemon-juice and sugar.
TIME. From 5 to 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A straightforward fry-up of sliced kidney with a sharpened gravy. Two things carry it: thorough soaking beforehand, and slices thin enough that a few minutes in the pan is genuinely enough.
- Slice thin, or braise insteadBeef (ox) kidney is much coarser than lamb's, and 5 to 10 minutes only works if the slices are no more than about a quarter-inch thick. Anything thicker will still be tough at that time, and kidney held longer over heat turns rubbery rather than tender — thick pieces belong in a long, wet braise, not this pan.
- The soaking is not optionalTwo hours in changed warm water draws out the ammoniac tang that comes from the kidney's function. Modern practice usually uses cold water or milk for the same purpose; either way, discard the soaking liquid and dry the slices well or they will steam instead of browning.
- Trim the coreMrs Beeton assumes a cook who already knows to remove the hard white fat and gristle at the centre of the kidney. Cut it away entirely before slicing; it never softens.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it takes a higher heat without burning. Ghee is essentially the same product, though cooked longer for a nuttier flavour, and is sold ready-made; ordinary butter cut with a neutral oil is an acceptable substitute here.
- "Highly-seasoned gravy"Most likely a well-reduced brown stock or meat gravy, sharpened with pepper and, as elsewhere in the book, possibly a little cayenne or mushroom ketchup. A small quantity means a few tablespoons — enough to pool in the centre of the dish, not to submerge the kidney.
- Lemon and sugarA quarter teaspoon of powdered (caster) sugar and a tablespoon of lemon juice go in off the heat, at the last moment. The pairing cuts the mineral heaviness of the offal; if the gravy is already sweet from reduction, cut the sugar back.
- Cost and yield1s. is the 1860s price, meaningless now beyond telling you this was cheap food. One ox kidney serves four as written, but only as a small course — with toast, mash or rice it makes a supper for two.
Kidney was standard cheap protein in Victorian households, and Mrs Beeton treats it as such: seasonable at any time, a shilling, dressed in ten minutes. The Book of Household Management devotes considerable space to offal because the whole animal was expected to be used, and the flavouring here — lemon juice with a pinch of sugar against a strong brown gravy — is the period's usual answer to the pungency of organ meat, the same logic that put sharp sauces beside liver and sweetbreads. Ox kidney had a second and better-known life in the era's pies and puddings, where its long cooking with beef enriched the gravy; this recipe is the quick alternative, closer to the devilled kidneys — more usually sheep's than ox — that appeared on breakfast sideboards. The stray words "BEEF KIDNEY" mid-sentence appear to be a stray piece of the original page, whether a caption, a section heading or a running head, pulled into the text by transcription.