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Veal Kidney with Anchovy
(Rognone alle acciughe) Take a veal kidney, remove the fat, cut it open and cover with boiling water. When the water has cooled, remove the kidney, wipe with a cloth, and pass through it clean sticks to make it stay open. Season with melted butter, salt and pepper and leave it so prepared for an hour or two.
Then take another piece of butter and two or three anchovies. Clean the latter, chop and mix with the butter with the blade of a knife, making a ball. Cook the kidney on the grill, but not too much, in order to keep it tender, put it on a plate and grease when hot with the ball of butter and anchovies. 151
A grilled offal dish that lives or dies on doneness: veal kidney cooked past medium turns grainy and bitter, so aim for a still-pink centre.
- The hinge: do not overcook"But not too much, in order to keep it tender" is the whole recipe. Over a hot grill a butterflied veal kidney needs roughly 3-4 minutes a side; the interior should stay rosy. Firm and grey means it is already ruined.
- Buying and cleaningOne veal kidney is about 8-10 oz and serves two as a second course. Order it from a butcher; peel away the surrounding suet and membrane, and cut out the pale gristly core at the centre where the ducts converge.
- The boiling-water soakMost likely a mild scald to firm the flesh and draw off the ammoniacal smell rather than a cooking step; the recipe gives no reason. Pour boiling water over, let it cool to room temperature, then drain and dry. If you are short of time, a 30-minute soak in cold water with a splash of milk or vinegar does much the same.
- "Clean sticks"Wooden or metal skewers run through the opened kidney to keep it flat over the coals so it cooks evenly instead of curling. Soak wooden ones first. Two skewers crossed work better than one.
- AnchoviesItalian recipes of this period usually mean salt-packed anchovies, which must be rinsed and filleted off the bone; the instruction to "clean" them points that way here. Oil-packed fillets substitute directly; use two or three, and hold back on the salt in the seasoning since they carry plenty.
- Making the ball of butterThis is compound butter. Mash the chopped anchovies into 2-3 tablespoons of softened butter with a knife blade until smooth, then chill it until firm so it melts over the hot kidney rather than sliding off as oil.
- Grill heatA charcoal grill at high heat, or a ridged cast-iron pan brought to smoking, gives the browning this dish depends on. A cool grill will steam the kidney and toughen it before any colour develops.
- ServingSlice across the lobes at the table so the juices mix with the melting butter. Bread or plain boiled potatoes; nothing acidic on the plate to compete with the anchovy.
Rognone, veal kidney, is generally understood to have been common second-course material in Italian household cooking well into the twentieth century, when offal was cheap and, by most accounts, sold fresh and cooked soon after buying. The pairing with anchovy butter belongs to a broader Italian habit of using salt-cured anchovy as a seasoning rather than a fish course: melted into butter it functions much as it does in a bagna cauda or a salsa verde, supplying salt and savour without announcing itself as fish. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was compiled for American readers, and much of it draws on the Italian domestic tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi a generation earlier, which is why instructions like "clean sticks" and "a piece of butter" are given without measurement — the assumption is a cook who already knows what a kidney should feel like.