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Veal Kidney Pie
Chop very fine three kidneys together with their fat, and stir in with them a small quantity of finely-chopped sweet herbs and chopped celery; season with grated nutmeg, mace and pounded cloves, and pepper and salt to taste, adding the chopped yolks of four hard-boiled eggs, and one scant breakfast cupful of grated breadcrumbs. Butter a pie dish, line it with puff paste, put in the above mixture, moisten with one or two tablespoonfuls of sherry, and cover the pie with a flat layer of puff paste; trim off evenly round the edges, moisten and press them together. Make a slight incision in the top of the pie, and bake in a slow oven. Serve while hot.
An Oscar-era forcemeat pie rather than the stewed steak-and-kidney sort: the kidney goes in raw and finely chopped, bound with crumbs and egg yolk. The instructions give neither temperature nor time, so both need supplying.
- The hinge: chop fine and cook throughBecause the filling is raw when it goes in, it must reach a safe internal temperature under the lid — 160F at the centre. A dense forcemeat in a covered pie takes roughly 50 to 60 minutes; check with a probe through the incision rather than by the colour of the crust.
- "A slow oven"300 to 325F. That suits the filling but works against puff paste, which needs a hot start to laminate. Give it 15 minutes at 400F to set and lift the pastry, then drop to 325F for the remainder, or blind-bake the bottom crust first.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — reckon 8 to 10 fl oz. "One scant breakfast cupful" of grated crumbs is about 1 cup of dry crumbs; use fresh crumbs and the same volume, and expect a lighter filling.
- The kidneysVeal kidneys are a butcher's order, sold whole in their suet. Three of them is a good deal of meat — perhaps 1 to 1 1/2 lb, depending on size and how much fat is left on. Split them, cut out the white core and any ducts, and soak in cold water or milk for half an hour if you want the flavour milder.
- Their fatThe suet that jackets a veal kidney is the intended binder and moistener. If your kidneys come trimmed, substitute 3 to 4 oz of beef suet or, at a pinch, cold butter grated in.
- Sweet herbsParsley, thyme and marjoram, with a little sage if you like it; "sweet" here means culinary rather than sugary. A tablespoon or two of the mixture, chopped, is enough against the spice.
- Mace and pounded clovesBoth are assertive. Use blade mace ground fresh or 1/4 teaspoon of the ground spice, and no more than two or three cloves' worth — pounded cloves dominate a pale meat quickly.
- MoistureOne or two tablespoons of sherry is very little for a crumb-heavy filling. A few spoonfuls of veal or chicken stock alongside it keeps the interior from baking dry, and the vent lets the excess steam escape.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only 'a pie dish'; the quantities suit something in the region of a 9-inch dish, serving perhaps six. It is good hot, as directed, and firm enough to cut cold the next day.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a nine-hundred-page compendium of what a fashionable American hotel kitchen was expected to know, drawn largely from the English and French repertoire of the day. Kidney pie belongs to the English side of that inheritance, but this version is not the familiar stewed steak-and-kidney: it is closer to a raised savoury pie or a pâté baked in paste, with hard-boiled yolk, breadcrumbs and a heavy hand of nutmeg, mace and cloves — a seasoning pattern often traced to eighteenth-century English meat pies, where sweet spices with organ meats are generally said to have been ordinary rather than daring. Veal kidney, prized in French cookery for its mildness and its generous cap of suet, seems to have raised no eyebrows in the hotel dining rooms of the period; its near-disappearance from American menus is a twentieth-century development, not a matter of taste in Oscar's time.