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Macaroni with Kidneys
Boil one-fourth pound of macaroni. Remove the fat from half a dozen mutton kidneys, or one beef kidney, skin them, cut them open, season with salt, cayenne and powdered mixed herbs and fry in butter, browning nicely on both sides; then stir in three-fourths of a pint of gravy flavored with tomatoes. Place the kidneys on a hot dish, surround them with the boiled macaroni, pour over the gravy, and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper and some chopped hard-boiled eggs, with a sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese.
A quick sauté dressed with a tomato-tinted brown sauce. The main risk is overcooking the kidneys, which turn granular and livery within a minute of being done.
- Cook the kidneys brieflyHalved lamb or mutton kidneys need roughly 2 to 3 minutes per side in hot butter and should stay faintly pink at the centre. Held longer, as they will be if you let them sit in the simmering gravy, they tighten and go grainy.
- Kidney sourcingMutton kidneys are effectively unavailable; lamb kidneys from a butcher are the direct substitute, six of them being roughly 10 to 12 oz. Beef kidney is much stronger and coarser, and is often soaked in cold salted water or milk for an hour and drained before cooking.
- Trimming"Cut them open" means splitting each kidney lengthwise through the middle; cut out the pale core of gristle and fat at the hinge, which will not soften.
- MeasuresOne-fourth pound of macaroni is 4 oz dry. Three-fourths of a pint is 1 1/2 cups in American measure — Oscar's book is American, so read pints as 16 oz, not the British 20.
- "Gravy flavored with tomatoes"In a hotel kitchen this would most likely have been brown sauce or espagnole from the stockpot with tomato purée stirred in. At home, 1 1/2 cups of good beef or veal stock reduced and thickened, with a tablespoon or two of tomato paste, gives the same effect. Deglaze the kidney pan with it so the browned residue goes into the sauce.
- Mixed herbs"Powdered mixed herbs" refers to a dried blend ground fine; such mixtures commonly drew on thyme, marjoram and savory, sometimes sage or a little rosemary, though proportions varied. Any dried mixed-herb blend works; use a scant teaspoon so it does not dominate the kidney.
- MacaroniCook to just firm rather than the softer stage many period recipes called for, drain, and toss with butter so it does not clump while you plate the kidneys.
- YieldServes two as a main course, three or four as a first course. The chopped egg and Parmesan go on at plating, off the heat.
Kidney was standard hotel and chophouse food in Oscar Tschirky's New York, cheap enough to be an everyday item and quick enough for à la minute service, which is why devilled kidneys, kidneys on toast and kidney omelettes crowd the breakfast and supper pages of period cookbooks. The dish itself is a hybrid of the sort the Waldorf's kitchen produced constantly: an English or French treatment of offal set on macaroni and finished with Parmesan, in the manner then loosely labelled "Italian." The chopped hard-boiled egg scattered over the top is a nineteenth-century garnish convention — often called à la polonaise when paired with browned butter — used here for colour against the dark sauce. Mutton kidneys appear as the first choice because mutton, the meat of a mature sheep, was still ordinary market fare; its near-disappearance from American butchers over the twentieth century is the main reason the recipe reads as archaic now.}