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Kidney and Mushrooms
(France.) Soak, parboil, and cut up a kidney, fry it in 2 ounces of butter or soup fat, add salt, pepper, an onion, chopped, and 12 button mushrooms, some parsley, and 1/2 pint of consomme, also a tablespoonful of white wine or sherry. Cook and stir 10 minutes, and serve on toast.
A brief, workable sauté in the style of a French rognons sautés. The original assumes you know how to dress a kidney, which is the part that decides whether the dish is good.
- Which kidneyThe single "kidney" here most likely means veal or lamb — mild, tender, and quick to cook. Beef kidney is much stronger and coarser, and would need longer stewing than the ten minutes given here. Reckon on one veal kidney, or three to four lamb kidneys, for two to three people.
- Soaking and trimmingSoak in several changes of cold water, or in milk, for an hour to draw out the ammoniacal smell. Peel off the membrane and cut out the white fatty core and any tubes before slicing; leaving the core in is the usual cause of a bitter, faintly urinous dish.
- ParboilingA brief blanch — two or three minutes in simmering water, then drained and patted dry. The point is to firm the flesh and rinse it, not to cook it through.
- The ten minutesKidney seizes and turns rubbery with prolonged heat. Brown the slices in the butter over good heat, lift them out, build the sauce with the onion, mushrooms and consommé, then return the kidney for the last two minutes only. Cooked and stirred continuously for a full ten minutes, sliced kidney will be tough.
- Half a pint of consomméHalf a pint of consommé is 1 1/4 cups if the book's measures are imperial. Homemade or a good chilled stock; a bouillon cube will make the sauce salty once it reduces, so hold back the salt until the end.
- Button mushroomsTwelve small whole white mushrooms, roughly 4 to 5 ounces. Trim the stems and leave them whole or halved so they hold their shape in the sauce.
- Soup fatThe skimmed fat from the top of a stockpot, kept in the larder for frying. Butter is the direct substitute; clarified butter or a mix of butter and oil browns better without burning.
- ServingServes two, perhaps three, as a lunch or supper dish. Thick toast, buttered, cut to fit the plate — the sauce is thin and the bread is doing the work of a starch.
Kidney with mushrooms belongs to the everyday French repertoire of abats — offal cooked fast in butter with a splash of wine and stock. The parenthetical "(France.)" is a national attribution in a book that groups its recipes by country. Sherry is offered as an alternative to white wine, which would have suited an Anglo-American pantry, where sherry was likelier to be on hand than an open bottle of dry white. Devilled and sautéed kidney was a fixture of the British breakfast and savoury course in this period, which may be why the dish needed no explaining beyond the method itself.