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Fried Beef Kidneys
Cut two kidneys in slices and soak in warm water for two and one-half hours, changing the water once or twice so as to cleanse them thoroughly; take the slices out, dust them over with flour, salt and pepper, put them in a fryingpan with three ounces of butter and fry to a light brown; place them in a circle on a dish, mix one tablespoonful of piquant sauce in one-half pint of gravy, add a teaspoonful of moist sugar, pour it in the center of the circle, and serve. As a rule beef kidneys are coarse, but cooked as above they are tender and luscious.
A late-Victorian treatment of the cheapest of the kidneys, built around a long soak and a fast fry. A few of the terms have shifted since 1896.
- Trim before soakingCut the kidney across into slices about a quarter inch thick and cut away the white core and any suet with the point of a knife. Beef kidney is many-lobed, and the fat and gristle at the centre carry much of the strong smell the soak is meant to reduce.
- The soakTwo and a half hours in warm water at room temperature is longer than modern food handling likes. Soak in the refrigerator instead, in cold or barely tepid water, changing it two or three times. Some cooks use lightly salted water or milk to the same end.
- Moist sugarNineteenth-century grocers sold sugar as loaf, crystallized or "moist" — the last being soft, damp, partly refined sugar. Light brown sugar is the closest thing on a modern shelf.
- Piquant sauceThe term covered both the classic made sauce piquante — vinegar, shallots and gherkins in a brown sauce — and the bottled sharp condiments of the period. Worcestershire, or a mushroom-and-vinegar steak sauce, gives a similar effect; a spoonful of Dijon whisked in also works.
- GravyHalf a pint is one cup, and 'gravy' here means brown stock or reduced meat juices of the sort a hotel kitchen would have kept standing. Use a cup of good beef stock reduced by a third, or thin demi-glace.
- ButterThree ounces is six tablespoons — generous for two kidneys. Half that is plenty in a modern nonstick or well-seasoned pan, and clarified butter or butter with a little oil will brown better without burning.
- Fry fastThis is the hinge. Kidney goes from tender to rubbery in under a minute of overcooking. Get the pan hot, work in batches so the slices sear rather than steam, and pull them at light brown with the centers still faintly pink.
- YieldTwo beef kidneys should make a substantial dish for about four as a main course, more as part of a breakfast or supper spread. The recipe has the sauce poured into the middle of the ring rather than over the meat.
Oscar Tschirky, the ma u00eetre d'h u00f4tel whose name fronts this 1896 volume, was cataloguing the working repertoire of a great American hotel, and that repertoire included the whole animal. Beef kidney was the cheapest and toughest of the kidneys — veal and lamb were the prized ones, reserved for grilling, while ox kidney was the traditional pie and pudding kidney — which is why the recipe bothers to argue its case in the last line. The long soak and the sharp, sweetened sauce are both answers to the same problem: beef kidney carries a strong ammoniac note that water draws out and vinegar-based condiments cover. Bottled "piquant" sauces of the sort called for here proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century, and a hotel kitchen may well have kept several on hand for exactly this kind of quick pan dish.