Recipes Of The Damned–Mar. 6, 2000: Kidney Stew
From How to Prepare Exciting Holiday Menus, Charlotte Adams, The Amy Vanderbilt Success Program for Women, Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday Inc., 1964.
This week’s booklet is a guide for the hostess to prepare for entertaining at five major holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, and the Fourth of July. The recipe for Kidney Stew comes from the New Year’s Day recipes. What a way to start the year! According to the author, you should offer up kidney stew with hominy grits, buttered peas, and ambrosia, at a brunch.
Ms. Adams is not so much trying to clarify established tradition as to offer up some helpful ideas for entertaining. This is just as well, as her grasp of historical tradition seems fuzzy as expressed in the foreword:
Fortunately, perhaps, traditions change and new ones are formed during the years. For one thing, we no longer serve the gargantuan feasts which were typical of the late 1890s. Perhaps this is going back to the beginnings of our country when, though every effort was made to really celebrate and make the table festive, there was not as much variety of food available.
No matter how many times I read that over, I just couldn’t make sense of it. Unless new discoveries in documented history prove that the United States was actually founded after the 1890s? No, I thought not. Still, we are not here to demonstrate our grasp of history but to entertain our swanky friends! So bring on the hominy grits and ambrosia!
Personally, I like hominy grits. Perhaps this makes me peculiar. I don’t much mind. But I can’t say I’m fond of kidneys. I know I tried them years and years ago when I was little, and while I can’t remember the taste very distinctly, I do remember not liking it much. Since then I have been dissuaded from trying them again by many things: nearly a decade spent as a vegetarian; a greater understanding of the waste processing function the kidneys play in the body; and years spent in the study of English literature, which brings the student sooner or later to James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the entry of Leopold Bloom into the narrative:
Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
With a description like that, how can you resist? Happy New Year, whenever you choose to celebrate it.
Kidney Stew
2 beef kidneys
1/4 cup butter
Large bunch of parsley, cut up fine with scissors
1 teaspoon salt
6 medium onions, sliced
Boiling water
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons flour
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Kitchen Bouquet (if needed)
Wash kidneys, pat them dry, and brown them on all sides in the 1/4 cup of butter. Put into a deep pot with parsley, salt, and onions. Cover with boiling water and simmer until kidneys are tender (2-3 hours). Remove kidneys and cut into small dice. Strain liquid. Melt the 3 tablespoons of butter and stir in flour smoothly. Add strained liquid and cook, stirring constantly, until thickened. If the sauce is not a good dark brown, add Kitchen Bouquet to color. Serves 8.
From How to Prepare Exciting Holiday Menus, Charlotte Adams, The Amy Vanderbilt Success Program for Women, Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday Inc., 1964.
