Kidneys
Beef, calf or lamb kidneys Flour 1 tablespoon butter Salt and pepper 1/2 tablespoon onion juice 3/4 cup water 2 tablespoons currant jelly.
Be sure that the kidneys are fresh. Remove all fat and white center; then soak them for an hour in salted water. Cut into half-inch slices, dust with flour and sauté in the butter for about five minutes. Add onion juice and water and simmer for about ten minutes. Add jelly, salt and pepper, and serve.
A straightforward sauté of kidney finished with a sweet-tart jelly sauce. The original assumes you know how to butcher a kidney and how long each type wants in the pan.
- Which kidney, and how muchBeef kidney is strong and coarse; veal and lamb are milder and more tender. The recipe gives no weight; the small sauce quantities suggest something on the order of a pound of trimmed kidney, but that is an inference, not stated.
- The trimming is the hinge"All fat and white center" means the entire core of gristle, fat and tubing, which carries most of the ammoniac flavor. Halve each kidney lengthwise and cut it out completely rather than paring around it.
- The soakAn hour in salted water (about a tablespoon of salt per quart) draws out blood and softens the smell. Some cooks use milk or acidulated water instead. Drain and pat thoroughly dry or the flour will paste rather than brown.
- Timings vary by animalFive minutes of sauté plus ten minutes of simmer suits lamb or veal. Beef kidney at that length is still tough; it wants either a much longer braise or, better, very quick high-heat cooking in slices. Kidney overcooked in the middle range turns rubbery and grainy.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: grate an onion and press the pulp through a sieve. Half a tablespoon of juice is roughly what a quarter of a medium onion yields. Finely grated onion works if you do not mind the texture.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, the standard English accompaniment to kidney and game. It is tarter than modern grape or apple jelly; if substituting, cut the sweetness with a splash of vinegar or red wine.
- ServingKidneys of this period were commonly served over toast or with mashed potatoes, which absorb the small quantity of sauce; the recipe itself says only "serve".
Kidney appears in American cookbooks of this era as an economical "variety meat," and the treatment here is essentially English: trimmed, soaked, floured, browned, and finished with red currant jelly, the same sweet-sour note traditionally served with mutton and game. The currant jelly is doing real work, since it both cuts the mineral edge of the offal and thickens the small amount of pan liquid. Loose-leaf cookbooks were sold as expandable binders so a cook could add pages. Organ meats became less common in ordinary American cooking over the course of the twentieth century, a decline usually attributed to rising incomes and changes in retail butchering rather than to any abrupt shift in taste.