Kidney Stew
3 Kidneys 3 Tablespoons Butter 1 Teaspoon Chopped Onions 1 Cup Brown Gravy Barley Flour 1/2 Lemon Toast Salt, Pepper, Mace Cut kidneys lengthwise, wash well, dry, and wipe carefully. Warm the butter and put in with the kidneys before really hot; add a little mace, salt and pepper to taste, the onion and gravy.
Simmer all together closely covered about ten minutes. Add the lemon juice and a little grated peel. Serve on hot toast. Thicken the gravy with barley flour, and pour over.
A quick sauté-and-simmer of kidneys in a ready-made brown sauce, of the sort that once appeared at breakfast as often as at dinner. Two things decide whether it works: the trimming and the timing.
- Which kidneys, and how manyThe book does not say. Lamb kidneys are the usual choice for a dish of this size, and two or three apiece is a common serving. A veal kidney may run to half a pound or more and one would serve two or three; beef kidney is coarse and strong and wants long braising, not ten minutes.
- Trim before you cook"Cut lengthwise, wash well, dry" glosses over the important part. Peel off the thin outer membrane and cut out the white core and any fat at the hinge, or the finished stew tastes of ammonia. A 20-minute soak in cold salted water or milk mellows them further.
- Ten minutes is the outside limitKidney firms up and turns to rubber the moment it passes medium. Lamb kidneys need roughly two to four minutes in the pan at a bare simmer and should still be faintly pink at the centre. Treat the ten minutes as the maximum for large veal kidney cut small, not as a target.
- "Before really hot"This reads as deliberate: the kidneys go into warm rather than sizzling butter, so the outside does not seize and toughen before the inside warms through. Keep the heat low the whole way.
- Brown gravyA cup of brown sauce: beef stock thickened with browned flour and butter. A cup of good beef stock reduced slightly, or decent demi-glace let down with water, stands in for it. Avoid granule gravy, which is mostly salt and will fight the lemon.
- Barley flourSold today in health-food and baking aisles; it thickens more softly than wheat flour and gives a slightly nutty, cloudy sauce. Whisk a teaspoon or two into a little cold stock before adding it, and give it a minute of simmering. Wheat flour or cornstarch will do if barley flour is not to hand.
- MaceThe outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. "A little" means a pinch — an eighth of a teaspoon of ground mace for three kidneys. Nutmeg, used sparingly, is the nearest substitute.
- Lemon at the endThe recipe adds juice and grated zest after the simmer; taking the pan off the heat first keeps the peel's perfume. Half a lemon is generous for three lamb kidneys; start with a squeeze and taste.
- The toastServe on thick toast, unbuttered, set on warmed plates. The point is to soak up a sauce this rich; thin sandwich bread collapses.
Kidneys on toast belonged to the British and American breakfast table for much of the nineteenth century, alongside devilled kidneys, kedgeree and broiled bacon, and they persisted into the early twentieth as a supper or luncheon dish. The construction here — offal warmed in butter, moistened with a cup of gravy, sharpened with lemon and scented with mace — suggests a kitchen with brown sauce already to hand, so a dish like this cost ten minutes rather than an afternoon. Mace and lemon peel together are an older seasoning habit, common in English cookery from the seventeenth century onward and used to lift strong-flavoured meats. That the recipe never bothers to tell the cook to remove the core suggests how ordinary organ meats then were: cheap, quick, and assumed knowledge.