Stewed Kidney
Boil kidneys the night before till very tender, turn meat and gravy into a dish and cover over. In the morning, boil for a few moments, thicken with flour and water, add part of an onion chopped very fine, pepper, salt, and a lump of butter, and pour over toasted bread well buttered. - Mrs. E. L. F.
A breakfast dish built on the previous day's work: the kidneys are simmered long and slow at night, then finished in minutes the next morning. The original assumes you know how to prepare kidney before it goes in the pot, which is the part that decides whether the dish is good or inedible.
- Trim and soak firstThe recipe skips this, and it matters more than anything else here. Split the kidneys, cut out the white core and any fat, and soak them in cold salted water or milk for an hour or two, changing it once; beef kidney benefits from a change of water in the initial boil as well. Untrimmed kidney carries a strong ammoniac smell that no amount of onion and butter will cover.
- Which kidneyThe recipe does not say. The long tenderizing simmer points to beef, and possibly veal or mutton; lamb kidneys are small and tender and would be ruined by it, cooking through in five minutes.
- The overnight holdThe recipe assumes some kind of cold storage. Cool the kidneys and their liquor quickly and refrigerate overnight, covered. Cooked meat left in its own broth at room temperature overnight is exactly the condition in which Clostridium perfringens spores, which survive boiling, germinate.
- Reheating"Boil for a few moments" is enough for flavor but not for safety after a night's storage. Bring the whole thing to a full boil and hold it there briefly so the meat and gravy are heated right through.
- ThickeningFlour and water means a slurry: whisk about a tablespoon of flour into two tablespoons of cold water per cup of gravy, stir it in, and boil a minute or two to cook out the raw taste. Cold water, not warm, or it lumps.
- The onionAdded raw at the end, finely chopped, it stays sharp. If you want it softened, sweat it in the butter first and stir both in together; as written it is pungent against the rich gravy.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities. A beef kidney, or eight to ten lamb kidneys, will serve about four over toast. Butter the toast heavily and spoon the kidneys over just before serving, or it goes to pulp.
Kidneys on buttered toast were a fixture of the nineteenth-century breakfast table on both sides of the Atlantic, alongside devilled kidneys, kedgeree and broiled chops. Offal was cheap, arrived with the rest of the butchered animal, and had to be used quickly, so cookbooks of the era treat kidney, liver, heart and tripe as ordinary weekday food rather than as curiosities. What dates this particular version is its structure: the long simmer happens the night before, leaving only a few minutes' work in the morning. The Dixie Cook Book credits this recipe to "Mrs. E. L. F.", and the instructions say nothing about coring or soaking the kidney.