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French Kidney Stew
Slice, season, and fry in 2 ounces of butter 2 fine veal kidneys which have been soaked and parboiled. These must be cut into dice, and then added, parsley, pepper, and salt. Merely brown the kidneys, or they will be tough. Now mix 3 sliced mushrooms with 1/2 cup of stock or consomme, thickened with flour and some butter, juice of a lemon, and a glass of sherry. Boil and pour over the kidneys, previously placed on slices of toast. BRAISED CALF'S LIVER (as cooked in Italy.) Boil and lard a fine fresh liver. Put it in a dish with 1/4 pound of chopped bacon, 2 carrots, 2 onions, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, salt, and pepper, and a pint of consomme. Cook 2 hours, add 1 cup of stewed tomatoes and a tablespoonful of sherry wine. Strain and reduce the sauce, after cooking 20 minutes longer. Brown the liver with a little flour, sprinkled over, and pour the sauce around, with 6 freshly fried mushrooms, and a border of cooked spaghetti.
Two entries run together here: a quick sauté of veal kidneys in sherry sauce, and a long-braised larded calf's liver in the Italian manner. Both assume a cook who knows how to handle offal and reduce a sauce without being told.
- Brown, do not cook throughThe instruction to "merely brown the kidneys" is the hinge of the first dish. Diced veal kidney needs two to three minutes over high heat and no more; past that the proteins tighten and the texture turns to rubber. The hot sauce poured over finishes them.
- Soaking and parboilingThe soak — an hour or two in cold water, or in milk or lightly acidulated water — draws out the ammoniac smell of the urinary tubules, which should be trimmed away with scissors first. The parboil is a further insurance against strong flavour and is optional if the kidneys are very fresh.
- A glass of sherryThe measure is unspecified; wineglass quantities in period cookbooks are commonly reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup, which is a reasonable reading here. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than a cream sherry; the sauce already has lemon juice and needs no sugar.
- Thickened with flour and some butterProbably a beurre manie: knead equal weights of soft butter and flour, about a tablespoon of each, and whisk it into the simmering stock in pieces. The recipe does not specify, and a roux would serve as well. Adding the lemon juice late, off the heat, will help preserve the bind, though the original has you boil the sauce with it.
- Three mushroomsAn unhelpfully vague measure. Reckon on 3 to 4 ounces of sliced cremini or button mushrooms for two people, sweated in butter first so their water does not slacken the sauce.
- Larding the liverThreading strips of pork fat through the meat with a larding needle keeps a whole calf's liver from drying over two hours of braising. Without a larding needle, bard the liver instead — wrap it in sheets of fatback or thin-sliced pancetta and tie it.
- "Boil and lard"The recipe gives no reason for the preliminary boil; it is best read as a brief blanch to firm the surface so the larding strips hold and the liver keeps its shape. On that reading it is not a cooking step, and the liver goes into the braise far from cooked through.
- Two hours of braisingThis is a period expectation, and it will give you a firm, sliceable, fully cooked-through liver in the pot-roast tradition rather than anything pink. The recipe specifies no oven and no temperature; keep it covered at a bare simmer, expect a dense texture, and note that modern cooks who want calf's liver rosy should be looking at a different preparation altogether.
- YieldThe kidney stew serves two to three on toast as a lunch or savoury course. The braised liver, from a whole calf's liver of 2 to 3 pounds with its spaghetti border, will serve six.
Both dishes belong to the age when offal was ordinary rather than adventurous, and when a kidney sauté on toast was as likely to appear at breakfast or as a savoury at the end of dinner as it was at the centre of a meal. The sherry-and-lemon sauce with mushrooms closely resembles a domesticated version of the French rognons au madère, a standard of restaurant cookery that travelled into English and American household books by way of just this sort of collection — recipes gathered abroad and written up for cooks at home. The liver entry, tagged "as cooked in Italy," shows the same impulse: larding, a mirepoix, consommé and a strained reduced sauce are straightforwardly French technique, with a cup of stewed tomatoes and a border of spaghetti added to signal the country of origin. That combination — classical French method wearing a national costume — is characteristic of travel cookery, and tells you more about how Americans and Britons imagined foreign kitchens than about what was on the table in Bologna.