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Lambs' Kidneys II
Soak, pare, trim, and slice six kidneys. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, sauté in butter, and remove to a hot dish. Cook one-half tablespoon finely chopped onion in two tablespoons butter until brown; add three tablespoons flour, and pour on slowly one and one-half cups hot stock. Season with salt and pepper, strain, add kidneys, and one tablespoon Madeira wine.
A brown-sauce treatment for lambs' kidneys, plainly written and easy to follow once a few 1896-era assumptions are unpacked. The whole dish stands or falls on how briefly the kidneys meet the heat.
- Do not overcook the kidneysSliced lamb kidney needs roughly a minute a side in hot butter, until the cut faces are browned and the centres still faintly pink. Held longer, or simmered in the sauce, they turn grainy and rubbery and no amount of Madeira rescues them.
- "Soak, pare, trim"Soak the kidneys 20-30 minutes in cold water (some cooks add a splash of milk or vinegar) to draw out the strong ammoniacal smell, then peel off the thin outer membrane and cut away the pale fatty core at the hinge. Slice about a quarter inch thick and pat thoroughly dry so they sear rather than steam.
- The sauce is a brown sauceOnion cooked to brown in butter, then flour, then hot stock is a simple brown sauce of the kind the book gives elsewhere; it is not a true espagnole. Let the flour cook in the butter until it smells nutty and takes colour, or the finished gravy tastes pasty. Three tablespoons flour to one and a half cups stock gives a thick, coating sauce; slacken with more stock if you want it pourable.
- StockThe recipe says only 'hot stock'; the book's own brown stock is made from beef. A good low-sodium beef stock works; season at the end, since reducing a salted commercial stock in a thick sauce will overshoot.
- Why strainStraining removes the browned onion and any flour lumps, leaving a smooth glossy sauce. Push it through a fine sieve, then return it to the pan.
- Adding the kidneys and wineWarm the kidneys through in the strained sauce over low heat, off the boil, and stir the Madeira in at the very end so its aroma survives. Any dry-ish Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho) suits; a medium-dry sherry is a fair substitute.
- Yield and servingSix lambs' kidneys make a modest main course for two or three, and stretch further as a savoury course or breakfast dish. Serve on toast points, rice, or mashed potato to catch the sauce.
Kidneys on the breakfast or luncheon table were routine in English and American households of the 1890s, and Fannie Farmer's book treats them as ordinary butcher's meat rather than a delicacy, giving several numbered variations. The Boston Cooking School's teaching method shows plainly here: the recipe is really a lesson in brown sauce, with the kidneys as the vehicle, and the same onion-butter-flour-stock sequence turns up throughout the book attached to different meats. Madeira held its place in American cooking long after it had faded as a drinking wine, and it appears repeatedly in nineteenth-century sauces where a modern cook might reach for sherry or brandy. The general decline of offal in American home cooking came later, with the mid-twentieth-century shift toward boneless, pre-cut muscle meat.