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Kidney Stew
(Baden-Baden.) Soak, parboil, and slice a fine calf's kidney. Fry it in 2 ounces of butter or dripping, adding salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoonfuls each of chopped truffles and mushrooms, and 1 tablespoonful of sherry, also parsley. Cook for 10 minutes more, serve with a border of fritters made according to recipe given elsewhere.
A short continental supper dish that depends almost entirely on how the kidney is handled before it meets the pan. The written ten minutes is the one instruction worth ignoring.
- Timing is the hingeSliced calf's kidney needs two to three minutes in hot fat, not ten more minutes after frying. Past that it tightens, weeps and turns to rubber; cook it fast and let it rest a moment off the heat.
- Soaking and parboilingThe soak (an hour in cold water, or milk, changed once) and the brief parboil are there to draw out the ammoniac tang. With a fresh kidney from a good butcher you can skip the parboil entirely and simply soak, dry and sear.
- TrimmingSplit the kidney and cut out the white core and any fat and membrane before slicing. Left in, it stays chewy no matter how the rest is cooked. Slice about a quarter inch thick.
- Calf's kidneyVeal kidney is a special order in most places now. Lamb kidneys are the closest easy substitute — allow four to six, halved — and they behave the same way. Beef kidney is stronger and coarser and is not a fair swap here.
- TrufflesTwo tablespoons of chopped truffle is a spa-town flourish, not a requirement. A tablespoon of finely chopped dried porcini, soaked and squeezed, gives a comparable depth; truffle oil does not.
- DrippingBeef or veal dripping was the ordinary frying fat of the period and is worth using if you have it. Butter alone will brown too quickly at the heat this needs — clarified butter or a butter-and-oil mix is safer.
- The sherryAdd it at the end, off the heat or with the pan pulled aside, and scrape up the fond. A dry amontillado or fino suits the dish; cream sherry will make it cloying.
- The border of frittersThis means a ring of small fried batter or potato fritters set round the edge of the platter, with the stew spooned into the middle. Fried bread croûtes or a rim of mashed potato do the same job.
- YieldOne calf's kidney serves two as a main course, three or four as an entrée in the older sense of a middle course.
Baden-Baden was a spa resort, and the attribution is doing the work of a menu note: a reader was meant to picture the kind of small, rich, wine-finished dish served in a German resort hotel with a French kitchen. Kidney with mushrooms, truffles and sherry belongs to that hotel repertoire rather than to any regional tradition. Offal held a respectable place on such menus, where a calf's kidney was a delicacy priced accordingly, not a thrift cut. The instruction to serve within a border of fritters reflects the plating conventions of the period, when an entr tframed by something crisp and was portioned at the table.