Home › Lamb And Mutton › Kidney Rolls
Kidney Rolls
Mix one-half cup stale bread crumbs, one-half small onion, finely chopped, and one-half tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Season with salt and pepper and moisten with beaten egg. Spread mixture on thin slices of bacon, fasten around pieces of lambs' kidney, using skewers. Bake in a hot oven twenty minutes.
WAYS OF WARMING OVER MUTTON AND LAMB Minced Lamb on Toast Remove dry pieces of skin and gristle from remnants of cold roast lamb, then chop meat. Heat in well-buttered frying-pan, season with salt, pepper, and celery salt, and moisten with a little hot water or stock; or, after seasoning, dredge well with flour, stir, and add enough stock to make thin gravy. Pour over small slices of buttered toast.
Two recipes share this page: kidney rolls wrapped in bacon, and a way of using up cold roast lamb. Both are quick, and the kidneys in particular punish overcooking.
- The hinge: do not overbakeLamb kidney turns firm and faintly ammoniac the moment it goes past medium. Twenty minutes at high heat is about right only if the pieces are small and the oven is genuinely hot; check at fifteen and pull them while the centre is still rosy.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; ovens were judged by feel. Modern editions and cooks usually read "hot" as somewhere around 400-450F. The upper end helps the bacon crisp in the time the kidney needs.
- Preparing the kidneysLamb kidneys come encased in suet and a thin membrane. Peel both away, halve lengthwise, and cut out the pale core of fat and tubes at the hinge. A 20-30 minute soak in cold water or milk mildens the flavour; drain and pat dry or the stuffing will slide.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread, torn or grated, not the dry sandy kind sold in canisters. Half a cup of packaged dried crumbs would absorb far more egg and bake to a paste.
- SkewersShort metal skewers or wooden toothpicks both work; soak wooden ones so they do not scorch at 450F. Streaky bacon, sliced thin, wraps and shrinks tight around the kidney as it cooks.
- YieldThe stuffing is enough for roughly six to eight kidney halves, which serves two or three as a breakfast or savoury course. Set the rolls on a rack over a pan; the bacon renders a good deal of fat.
- Minced lamb on toastThe second method wants cold cooked lamb chopped, not ground; food processors reduce it to paste. Reheat only until hot through, three or four minutes, and use plenty of stock, as reheated roast lamb dries out fast.
- Celery saltStill sold, and worth using here. Season with it first and add plain salt afterwards if needed, since the blend carries salt of its own.
Kidney was ordinary food in 1896 rather than an adventure, and it appears in this book among the mutton and lamb recipes, on the same page where the section on "warming over" what was left begins. The pairing of kidney with bacon is an old British breakfast habit, and the practice of binding a forcemeat of crumbs, onion and parsley around a small piece of meat with a skewer recalls the old French kitchen word attelet or hatelet, meaning a small skewer, though no line of descent is documented. The second half of the page is the more revealing document: an entire section on remnants of cold roast lamb reflects a household that bought large joints, ate them hot on Sunday and was expected to account for every ounce afterward, at a time when refrigeration meant an icebox and leftovers had a short and closely watched life.