Home › Lamb And Mutton › Ragout of Kidneys
Ragout of Kidneys
Soak lambs' kidneys one hour in lukewarm water. Drain, clean, cut in slices, season with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter. Fry one sliced onion and one-half shallot, finely chopped, in three tablespoons butter until yellow; add three tablespoons flour and one and onefourth cups Brown Stock. Cook five minutes, strain, and add one-half cup mushroom caps peeled and cut in quarters; season with salt and pepper, add kidneys, and serve as soon as heated. White wine may be added if desired.
A quick sauté-and-sauce dish that lives or dies on timing. Everything else here is straightforward once a few 1896 assumptions are translated.
- The hinge: do not cook the kidneys twiceKidneys turn grainy and bitter the moment they pass medium. Sear the floured slices hard in butter for about a minute a side, set them aside, and return them to the finished sauce only long enough to warm through — the recipe's "serve as soon as heated" is the whole technique.
- Soaking and cleaningThe hour in lukewarm water draws out blood and the ammoniac smell; cold water works as well and is safer for holding raw offal. After draining, halve each kidney, peel off the thin outer membrane, and cut out the white core and any fat with the point of a knife before slicing.
- Brown StockThe book's own recipe is a long-simmered beef and bone stock. A good unsalted beef stock, reduced by a quarter to concentrate it, stands in; season at the end, since the roux-thickened sauce will taste saltier as it reduces.
- "One-half shallot"An ambiguous measure. Read it as roughly a teaspoon of finely chopped shallot, or half of one small modern shallot, alongside the sliced onion.
- The rouxThree tablespoons flour to three tablespoons butter and only 1¼ cups stock gives a heavy, gravy-thick sauce by current taste. Cooking the flour until it smells nutty before the stock goes in prevents pastiness, and the straining step removes the onion, so the finished sauce should be smooth.
- MushroomsPeeling caps was standard when mushrooms arrived gritty and field-grown. Cultivated button or cremini mushrooms need only wiping. Half a cup quartered is roughly 1½ to 2 oz; sautéing them separately in butter improves both flavour and colour.
- The white wineNo quantity is given. About ¼ cup, added after the flour and cooked down briefly before the stock, is a reasonable modern reading.
- Yield and servingFour lambs' kidneys are a reasonable reading of "lambs' kidneys" here and will serve two as a main course or three or four at breakfast. Serve on buttered toast, or over rice or plain boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Kidneys were breakfast and luncheon food in the Anglo-American kitchen. "Ragout" is simply the French ragoût, from ragoûter, to revive the appetite — by the nineteenth century it meant any meat cooked in a thickened, well-seasoned sauce rather than a specific dish. The method here is textbook cooking-school French: a brown roux built on onion and shallot, moistened with the book's standard Brown Stock, strained for smoothness, and finished with mushrooms and optional white wine. The strained brown sauce is a simplified relative of sauce espagnole, pared down for home cooks, and similar brown-sauce bases recur in the meat chapters with different garnishes attached.