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Fried Veal Kidney
Remove the fat from several kidneys and cut them into rather thin slices; spray the slices with pepper and salt, plunge them into well-beaten egg and then into breadcrumbs and fry in a stewpan with a little butter until done. Put a mince of mushrooms in the center of a dish, place the slices of kidney around, cover over with a few tablespoonfuls of Colbert sauce, and serve.
A straightforward hotel-kitchen dish that stands or falls on two things: buying kidney fresh and taking it off the heat early. Oscar assumes a cook who already knows the sauces, so the supporting elements need filling in.
- Cook them brieflyThin slices of veal kidney need only a minute or two per side, until the crumbs are golden and the interior is still faintly rosy. Pushed past that they turn grainy and tighten into rubber, and no sauce will rescue them.
- Buying and trimmingVeal kidney is sold as a multi-lobed cluster wrapped in hard suet. Peel away the fat and membrane and cut out the pale gristly core at the base of the lobes; the core and tubes are usually blamed for the sharp smell people object to. Figure one veal kidney for two to three people as a course.
- Freshness matters more than soakingOlder books often call for a soak in milk or acidulated water. With a genuinely fresh kidney it is unnecessary; if it smells strongly of ammonia when you unwrap it, no soak will fix it.
- "Spray with pepper and salt"Simply season the slices on both sides. Season the breadcrumbs lightly as well, since the coating is what you taste first.
- StewpanA straight-sided pan of the period; use a heavy skillet or sauté pan at frying heat. Clarified butter, or butter with a little neutral oil, keeps the milk solids from blackening before the crumbs colour.
- Mince of mushroomsThis is duxelles in all but name: mushrooms chopped very fine, squeezed of moisture, and cooked down in butter with shallot until dry and dark. Made in advance it holds for several days.
- Colbert sauceIn the classical repertoire this is a meat glaze mounted with butter and finished with lemon juice and chopped tarragon, sometimes with a little madeira; Oscar does not define it. It behaves as a warm butter sauce, so keep it barely warm and never let it boil or it will split.
- Assembly and timingHave the duxelles and sauce ready before the kidney goes into the pan. Breaded slices lose their crispness within a few minutes under sauce, so plate and serve at once.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s onward, and the cookbook that carries his name reflects a large French-influenced American hotel kitchen at the turn of the century. Offal was ordinary restaurant fare then rather than a specialty item, and veal kidney in particular was prized as the mildest of the kidneys, fine enough for a hotel luncheon card. The Colbert sauce that finishes the dish belongs to the classical French repertoire and is generally traced by name to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though like most such attributions the connection is culinary tradition rather than documented fact. The recipe's brevity is telling: Oscar names two preparations, duxelles and Colbert, without explaining either.