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April 19
Menu: Kidney Soup; Flounder, White Sauce; Roast Shoulder of Mutton; Spinach au Jus; Potatoes; Cauliflower and Red Pepper Salad; Moulded Pears, Whipped Cream; Coffee Kidney Soup-1/2 pound ox kidney, 1/2 pound lean beef, 3 pints brown stock, 3 tablespoons coarsely chopped fat bacon, 1 tablespoon chopped onion, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons Crisco, salt and pepper to taste. Wash kidney and beef quickly, dry them, and cut them up quite small. Melt Crisco in saucepan, add bacon, onion, and kidney, and fry them until brown. Add stock and salt to taste, and simmer soup for about 2½ hours. Strain out solid parts, pound them to a paste, and rub this through fine wire or hair sieve. Rinse out pan, mix flour smoothly and thinly with little of strained soup. Reboil rest of liquid, pour in flour, and stir it till it boils. Cook for ten minutes and carefully skim it. Then mix in smoothly sieved meat, add seasoning, reheat soup without boiling it after adding meat, and it is ready to serve. Water can replace stock; if so, add piece of carrot and turnip and bunch herbs to soup, but do not pound or sieve these. A more delicate soup is made with four or five sheep's kidneys instead of ox kidney. Add little caramel coloring if needed.
A Victorian-style purée soup, thickened with both flour and the sieved meat itself. Most of the work is in the straining, and a blender does in a minute what a hair sieve took twenty to accomplish.
- The hinge: no boiling at the endOnce the sieved meat paste goes back in, the soup is only reheated. Boiling at that stage makes the purée separate and turn grainy, and it flattens the flavour of the kidney. Hold it just below a simmer.
- Prepare the kidney properlyOx kidney needs the hard white core and any membrane cut away before it is chopped; the recipe's "wash quickly" assumes a cook who already knew this. Soaking it for around half an hour in salted water or milk is a common modern recommendation for softening the ammoniac edge; dry it well afterwards so it browns rather than steams.
- MeasuresThree pints is 6 cups of stock in US measure, though the book's British-derived phrasing could mean imperial pints (7½ cups). Either works; start with 6 cups and top up as it reduces over the long simmer.
- CriscoThis book was published to sell it, so shortening appears everywhere. Two tablespoons of any neutral fat browns the meat identically; beef dripping or butter with a little oil gives more flavour.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, used for fine straining in this period. Pulse the drained solids in a food processor with a ladle of the liquid, then push the purée through a fine-mesh sieve with a rubber spatula.
- SourcingOx kidney means beef kidney, which a supermarket rarely stocks; order it from a butcher. Lamb kidneys, the recipe's "more delicate" option, are easier to find and much milder — four or five stands in for the half pound.
- Caramel colouringA period pantry staple: sugar cooked to near-black and let down with water, used to darken soups and gravies. Skip it, or use a few drops of a dark soy or a commercial gravy browning.
- Time and yieldThe recipe's 2½-hour simmer suits tough ox kidney and shouldn't be cut short. Expect roughly four to six first-course servings.
Kidney soup was a fixture of nineteenth-century British and American household cookery, sitting alongside mock turtle and ox-tail as one of the thrifty "brown soups" built from stock and the cheaper parts of a beef carcass. Its structure here — long simmer, solids pounded and pushed through a sieve, then returned to enrich the liquid — is the classic purée method that predates the blender and explains why old recipes assign so much labour to a mortar and a hair sieve. What makes this version a period document is the company it keeps: it comes from the cookery literature Procter & Gamble published to introduce hydrogenated vegetable shortening to cooks who had always used lard, butter or dripping, and the dated "calendar of dinners" format — this one is filed under April 20 — quietly inserts two tablespoons of Crisco into inherited recipes like this one.