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Kidneys in Champagne

Kidneys sautéed with butter, salt, cayenne, water, champagne, and mushroom ketchup, then stewed until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Kidneys in Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the kidneys

  1. Heat a stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Add the butter and let it melt.

  3. Add the minced kidneys and brown them in the butter.

  4. Sprinkle with salt and cayenne pepper.

  5. Pour in the boiling water and champagne (or wine).

  6. Cover the pan and let it stew until the kidneys are tender.

Serve

  1. Serve hot in a covered dish.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Champagne + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + champagnetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Kidneys
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the kidneys in the pan.
Champagne or other wine
Adds acidity and aroma, and with the water forms the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the kidneys in the butter. Browning creates savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. If the kidneys are crowded or the pan is too cool, they steam grey instead of browning, which weakens the final flavour.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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