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Kidneys and Lettuce
Put on some water to boil. Take your lettuce, and choose the round kind, and wash it well. Take out neatly with your fingers the center leaves, and fill up instead with a sheep's kidney which you have lightly dusted with flour, pepper, and salt. Tie the lettuce round very firmly and set it in a pan of boiling water that covers up only three quarters of the vegetable. Boil for eighteen minutes. Take out the lettuce, untie it, drain it, and serve at once. Kidneys are good when they are placed inside large Spanish onions and gently stewed, in which case a dab of made mustard is given them.
A single-serving dish of lamb's kidney poached inside a lettuce, from a book of wartime refugee cookery. The whole thing turns on the kidney being trimmed and the lettuce parcel being tied tightly enough to hold together in boiling water.
- Sheep's kidneyWhat a butcher today sells as lamb's kidney, usually 2 to 3 oz each. Halve or split it to snip out the white core and pull off any membrane; the older habit of a 20-minute soak in salted water or milk mutes the ammoniac edge if that bothers you.
- The right lettuce"The round kind" most likely means a butterhead or cabbage lettuce — Boston, Bibb, or the soft round heads sold loose. Iceberg is brittle and awkward to tie, and romaine's long leaves are harder to close over the filling.
- TyingUse cotton kitchen twine in two directions, like a parcel, and pull it tighter than seems necessary. The leaves slacken as they wilt, and a loose head unravels in the pan and spills the kidney.
- Water levelBoiling water to three-quarters of the height means the exposed top steams rather than boils, so the outer leaves keep some shape. Use a pan just wide enough to hold the head upright without it tipping.
- The eighteen minutesThat is about right for a single small kidney inside a wet lettuce, but check rather than trust it: cut into the thickest part and look for firm, uniformly brown-pink flesh with clear juices, or take it to 160F. Kidney is offal and should not be served rare; equally, much beyond that point it turns to rubber.
- SeasoningFlour, pepper and salt dusted on the kidney is all the seasoning there is, and boiling water gives nothing back. Season the lettuce leaves as well, and a knob of butter or a spoon of pan liquid over the drained parcel is not out of keeping.
- The onion variationHollow out large Spanish onions, seat a kidney in each, and stew covered in a little stock at a bare simmer — reckon on an hour or more, since the onion has to soften. "Made mustard" simply means prepared mustard from the jar rather than dry powder.
- YieldOne lettuce and one kidney per person. It is a light lunch or supper dish rather than part of a larger meal, and needs bread and something else on the plate to make it substantial.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain in 1915 from recipes collected from Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and the book's purpose was as much charitable and patriotic as culinary. That context shows plainly here: a whole lettuce and one cheap sheep's kidney make a meal, cooked in a single pan of water with no stock, no butter and no oven. Braised and stuffed lettuce is a long-established idea in French and Belgian home cooking, where firm cabbage lettuces were treated as a cooking vegetable rather than only a salad, a use that has largely dropped out of English-speaking kitchens.