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Stewed Kidneys
Skin, wash and dry some kidneys, cut them into round slices and dust with salt and pepper. Put one tablespoonful of butter and half that quantity of flour into a fryingpan, and when it is hot put in the kidneys, stir for two or three minutes, add one gill of water or stock and boil it up, stirring in one teaspoonful of lemon juice. Pile four tablespoonfuls of mashed potatoes on a plate, arrange the slices of kidney around the potatoes and then pour over and around the potatoes the gravy, which should be very thick, then garnish the dish with small pieces of toast.
Boiled Leg of Mutton with Caper Sauce Cut off the shank bone from a leg of mutton, trim and make an incision at the first joint; put it on to boil in a stockpot filled with cold water and salt slightly, add a bunch of parsley and one carrot cut up. Boil for an hour or more, and, according to size, serve with a pint of hot caper sauce made by putting a pint of hot Hollandaise sauce into a saucepan and heating thoroughly without boiling for five minutes, and then adding a heaping tablespoonful of capers, or else an ordinary caper sauce may be used instead. Boiled Leg of Mutton with Oyster Stuffing Take a dozen or more large oysters, remove the beards and uneatable parts, parboil them, chop them up with boiled parsley, onion and sweet herbs, adding the yolks of two or three hard-boiled eggs. Make five or six incisions in the fleshy part of a leg of mutton, put in the stuffing, tie it up in a cloth and boil in a saucepan with plenty of water for from two to two and one-half hours, according to size. When done remove the cloth, place on a dish, and serve at once.
Three linked dishes from the Waldorf's kitchen: a quick kidney sauté and two treatments of a boiled leg of mutton. The kidneys are a matter of minutes; the mutton is a matter of hours.
- The hinge: do not overcook kidneysTwo or three minutes in the pan, plus the moment it takes the sauce to boil up, is the whole cooking time. Kidney sliced thin sets firm almost immediately and turns to rubber if it simmers on.
- Which kidneysThe recipe says only "some kidneys". Cutting into neat rounds points to veal or lamb kidneys rather than beef, which is coarser and stronger. Skinning means peeling off the papery membrane; the white core at the centre is usually trimmed out as well, though the recipe does not say so.
- SoakingPeriod cookery books often direct that kidneys be soaked in salted or acidulated water before cooking to reduce the ammoniacal smell. This recipe does not; it stirs in lemon juice at the end instead.
- A gillHalf a cup. With a tablespoon of butter and a scant half-tablespoon of flour, half a cup of stock gives the very thick gravy called for; the flour here is barely a thickener, more a binder.
- YieldAs written this is one plate — four tablespoons of mashed potato and the slices from one or two kidneys make a single breakfast or luncheon serving. Scale by the plate rather than by the pan.
- Boiling times for the mutton"Boil for an hour or more" is short for a whole leg; the recipe leans on "according to size". Judge by internal temperature rather than the clock, and keep the pot at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, or the outer meat shreds.
- Mutton itselfMutton is sheep over a year old, with a stronger, fattier flavour. Butchers rarely stock it; a leg of lamb behaves the same way in the pot but is milder and needs less time.
- The caper sauceA pint of hollandaise held at heat for five minutes is a fragile proposition — the emulsion breaks above roughly 180F. Keep it well below a simmer, off direct heat, and add the capers at the last moment. The "ordinary caper sauce" Oscar offers as an alternative is a butter-and-flour white sauce, which is far steadier.
- The oyster stuffing"Beards" are the dark frilled gills and any bit of shell or muscle; parboiling firms the oysters so they can be chopped. Stuffing pushed into incisions in the leg will work its way out unless the joint is tied firmly in the cloth, as directed.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms at a moment when boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce was still a fixture of Anglo-American hotel menus — plain, expensive meat treated plainly, the sauce doing the flattering. The oyster-stuffed version belongs to the same nineteenth-century American habit that put oysters into turkey dressing, beef pies and sauces: on the Atlantic coast they were cheap, abundant and used as a seasoning as much as a delicacy. Kidneys on toast with piped potato, meanwhile, is hotel breakfast cookery, one of the several offal dishes that the great houses served in the morning and that are often said to have faded from American menus in the decades after the First World War. That the three sit together under one heading is a reminder that these pages were compiled as a working kitchen's reference rather than a book to read straight through.