Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Kidney Sauce
Kidney Sauce
Cut four small or one large beef kidney into slices, dust with flour and put them into a fryingpan with three ounces of butter, a few sweet herbs and half an onion cut up small. Toss the pan gently over a moderate fire for eight minutes, add one pint of water and simmer gently for two hours, skimming frequently. Pass it through a fine sieve or strainer, and serve.
This is a brown essence, not a dish of kidneys: the meat gives up its flavour to the liquid over two hours and the solids are left behind in the sieve. Read it as a sauce base to go under grilled meat, toast, or a game bird.
- Prep the kidney firstBeef kidney needs the white core and surrounding fat cut away before slicing, and a common step is to soak the slices in cold salted water or milk before patting them dry. Soaking helps keep the sauce from tasting sharply ammoniac.
- "Sweet herbs"Period shorthand for the mild kitchen herbs — thyme, parsley, marjoram, a bay leaf — as opposed to strong or bitter ones. A small bundle tied with string is easiest to fish out before straining.
- Butter and pan sizeThree ounces is six tablespoons, generous for one pint of liquid but it is carrying the flour and the browning. Use a wide pan so the slices sear rather than steam in the first eight minutes.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern burner, medium: hot enough that the flour and butter colour to a nut brown, not so hot that the butter blackens. The colour built in these eight minutes is the colour of the finished sauce.
- One pint of liquid, two hoursA US pint is 16 fl oz. Over two hours at a bare simmer, uncovered, that will reduce a long way — keep it at the barest bubble and top up with a little hot water if it threatens to go dry. Stock in place of water gives a considerably better sauce.
- Skim, and mean itKidney and butter both throw scum and fat. Frequent skimming is what separates a clear, glossy sauce from a greasy one; a final blot with paper towel across the surface at the end helps.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified, which is common in this book. Season only after straining and reducing, since the volume drops sharply.
- YieldExpect roughly a cup to a cup and a half of finished sauce — four to six servings as an accompaniment. The strained solids are spent and are usually discarded.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), was compiling for a hotel kitchen that worked in the French manner, where a sauce was frequently built from an inexpensive cut cooked down and thrown away — the flavour was the product, not the meat. Beef kidney was cheap and strongly flavoured. Kidney sauces and kidney gravies appear widely in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, usually served with grilled steak, mutton, or on toast at breakfast and supper, and the technique here — flour-dusted slices browned in butter, then a long skimmed simmer — is a plain kitchen version of the classic brown-sauce method. The recipe also shows how routinely offal moved through a grand hotel.