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Beef Kidney Rissoles
Cut a beef kidney into even slices and shape them into rounds, also the same quantity of bacon or ham cut into smaller rounds. Place the slices of bacon and ham over the kidney, then hard boiled eggs in slices over them, and fasten the slices together with a little warmed butter and the beaten yolk of an egg. Sprinkle over with salt and pepper, cover them well with the breadcrumbs, put them in a saucepan with a little butter, and fry for half an hour. Serve on a dish with brown gravy.
A layered fried kidney sandwich of the sort that filled out an American hotel breakfast or luncheon card around 1900. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to clean a kidney, and a cooking time that will destroy it if taken literally.
- Half an hour is too longHalf an hour is a long time -- beef kidney is lean and turns rubbery and strongly ammoniac once cooked hard. Crumbed slices about a quarter-inch thick want a few minutes a side in hot butter, until the coating is brown and the kidney just firm. The recipe specifies neither thickness nor heat; the half hour may assume a low flame and thicker slices than one would cut for a crumbed round.
- Preparing the kidneyA beef kidney needs the outer membrane peeled off and the white core of fat and tubes cut out before slicing. Soaking the slices in cold water or milk for an hour, then draining and patting dry, takes down the sharpness; the drying matters, or the crumbs will slide off.
- Bacon or hamModern wet-cured bacon is wetter than the dry-cured bacon of the period, and its salt level varies. Cut it thin, and consider a brief dry-pan render before assembly so it crisps rather than steams between the layers.
- Making the layers holdWarmed butter and raw egg yolk are the glue, and the stack holds together much better if chilled before crumbing. Assemble, press, refrigerate twenty minutes, then brush with beaten egg and coat with fine dry breadcrumbs. A second layer of egg and crumbs gives a shell sturdy enough to turn.
- "A saucepan with a little butter"This means shallow frying in a heavy pan, not deep fat. Butter alone will brown too fast; half butter and half neutral oil, or clarified butter, holds up better at frying heat.
- Brown gravyIn period usage this usually meant a made brown sauce of the espagnole type rather than a quick pan gravy, though espagnole is itself thickened with a brown roux. Deglazing the pan with stock and a spoonful of madeira or sherry, reduced and finished with butter, is close to the intent.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. A beef kidney (commonly one to two pounds) sliced into rounds will make enough for about four as a luncheon dish, with the eggs and bacon accounted for.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf, only its maître d'hôtel, but his 1896 Cook Book collected the working repertoire of the hotel's kitchens, and it is thick with organ meats in a way American cookbooks stopped being by the 1950s. Kidney, liver and sweetbreads were cheap, respectable and expected on a hotel breakfast or luncheon menu; the English influence on grand-hotel cooking of the period kept them there. A rissole, the older word, which comes through Old French from a Latin root meaning reddish and is related to the verb rissoler, to brown, originally meant a filling enclosed in pastry and fried, but at some point the word loosened in English usage to cover almost any small crumbed and fried item, which is how a stack of kidney, bacon and hard-boiled egg comes to bear the name.