Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stewed Lambs' Kidneys
Stewed Lambs' Kidneys
Pare, trim and skim a dozen kidneys, cut them into slices and cook for five minutes in a fryingpan with one ounce of clarified butter, one tablespoonful of salt and one teaspoonful of pepper. Brown well and then add one-half pint of Spanish sauce and four mushrooms cut into pieces. Warm without boiling, add the juice of half a lemon and one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, and serve.
A brisk sauté finished in brown sauce, written for a brigade that had espagnole standing on the stove all day. Two things need attention before you start: the salt quantity and the sauce.
- "Skim" means skinThe instruction is to pare, trim and skin the kidneys — pull off the thin membrane, halve them and cut out the white core and fat at the centre, which stays tough and tastes of ammonia.
- Cut the salt hardA tablespoon of salt for twelve small kidneys is a great deal, especially as the dish is finished with half a pint of espagnole, itself a seasoned sauce. Start with a teaspoon of fine salt, season again at the end.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: the classic brown mother sauce of brown roux, brown stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. Half a pint is one cup. A good reduced veal or beef demi-glace is the practical stand-in.
- Warm without boilingThis is the hinge. Kidneys seize and go rubbery and grainy the moment the sauce simmers; they want to come up to serving heat and no further.
- Dry pan, hot panPat the slices thoroughly dry and work in two batches. Twelve kidneys' worth of sliced meat in one ounce of butter will steam rather than brown, and the browning is where the flavour of the finished dish comes from.
- Lemon and parsley lastBoth go in off the heat. The acid brightens the heavy brown sauce, and parsley added to a hot pan turns dull and grassy.
- MushroomsFour mushrooms cut in pieces; sauté them separately until their water has gone before they meet the sauce, or they will thin it.
- YieldA dozen lambs' kidneys is roughly 1 to 1½ lb trimmed and serves about six as a main course, more as a breakfast or savoury course.
Kidneys were everyday eating in 1896, when Oscar Tschirky's book appeared, and lambs' kidneys in particular sat on hotel breakfast menus and supper cards on both sides of the Atlantic — small, mild and quick to cook, unlike the coarser beef kidney that went into pies. What marks this as a Waldorf kitchen recipe rather than a domestic one is the casual half-pint of Spanish sauce: espagnole was one of the foundation sauces codified in nineteenth-century French practice and later fixed in Escoffier's system, and a hotel brigade kept gallons of it going so that a cook could ladle out a cup for a plate of kidneys without a second thought. Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who became the public face of the Waldorf, was not a chef by trade, and the book reads as a record of his kitchen's working repertoire — terse, seasoned by the handful, and assuming a stockpot someone else has been tending since morning.