No. 1527

Veal Kidneys with White Wine

Rognons de Veau au Vin Blanc

For six persons take three small fresh veal kidneys, pare off the fat and fibers and cut them up into small slices; fry these with some butter in a sautoir or frying pan and toss them over a very brisk fire; season and as soon as the meats are seized, remove them with a skimmer on a dish, leaving the liquid in the pan; stir into this one gill of stock (No. 194a), as much white wine and four ounces of mushroom heads cut in four, cook while covered for five minutes, thicken the sauce with a little butter kneaded in flour, or else use some thick brown sauce (No. 414); let the sauce cook and reduce with it the kidney liquor that is in the pan, and when reduced and consistent, put back the kidneys with some chopped parsley, heat without boiling and serve. These kidneys may be garnished with triangular croutons of bread-crumbs fried in butter.

← No. 1526 Veal Kidneys with Marrow Veal No. 1528 Leg or Haunch of Veal, a la Miribel →

For the Modern Kitchen

A fast sauté that lives or dies on two things: dry kidneys hitting a very hot pan, and a sauce that never returns to a boil once the kidneys go back in. Ranhofer's cross-references to numbered stocks and sauces can be met with good modern equivalents.

The hinge: no boiling at the endReheating the kidneys in the finished sauce over gentle heat keeps them pink and tender. A boil tightens them into rubber within a minute, and no amount of further cooking brings them back.
A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So half a cup of stock and half a cup of dry white wine.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan. Any wide heavy skillet works, but use one large enough that the slices sit in a single layer with space between them, or they will steam in their own juice instead of browning.
Stock No. 194a and brown sauce No. 414Cross-references to Ranhofer's own stock and brown sauce entries elsewhere in the book. A well-reduced veal or beef stock stands in for both, or thicken with the beurre manie the recipe offers as an alternative.
Buying kidneysThree small veal kidneys will come to something in the region of 1 to 1.5 lb total, depending on size. They should smell clean and faintly sweet. Some cooks soak them briefly in milk or salted water; if you do, dry them thoroughly, since surface moisture prevents the searing the recipe depends on.
Paring"Fat and fibers" means the enclosing suet and the white core of connective tissue at the centre. Split each kidney lengthwise and cut the core out entirely; it stays tough however briefly it is cooked.
TimingsThe searing is a matter of two to three minutes of hard tossing — "as soon as the meats are seized" means browned outside, still rosy within. The mushrooms and liquid take their five minutes, then reduce until the sauce coats a spoon.
Croutons"Croutons of bread-crumbs" here means slices of crumb, the soft interior of the loaf, cut in triangles and fried in butter, not crumbs as we use the word.
YieldAs written, six portions in the Delmonico sense — a small course among many. As a main dish with rice, potatoes or noodles it serves three or four.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole working repertoire of the restaurant, several thousand numbered items cross-referenced to one another like a code of law. Kidneys get more than one consecutive entry here -- No. 1526 with marrow, No. 1527 with white wine -- which says something about how offal sat on an American luxury menu of the 1890s: not as thrift food but as a delicacy. The white wine treatment is a straightforward classical sauté in the French manner Ranhofer trained in, and the instruction to "heat without boiling" is the sort of practical warning that separates a working kitchen manual from a genteel household book of the same decade.