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Stewed Kidneys

A stew of sliced kidneys simmered with water or stock, cloves, onion juice, butter, flour, herbs, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stewed Kidneys

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the kidneys

  1. Cut the kidneys into thin, round slices.

  2. Cover the kidneys with cold water and let them soak for 4 hours.

  3. Wash the kidneys clean.

Make the stew

  1. Place the kidneys in a saucepan with water or stock, cloves, onion juice, salt, and pepper, then simmer for 2 hours.

  2. Heat butter in a frying pan. Add flour and stir until brown and smooth.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the kidneys and stir in sweet herbs.

  4. Simmer for an additional 30 minutes.

  5. Adjust seasoning with more salt and pepper if needed. Add lemon juice if desired.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Kidneys
Form the main body of the stew, becoming tender through long simmering.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the thickening base.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid when cooked in butter and stirred in.
Onion juice
Adds aromatic flavour to the stew liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in butter. Stirring flour into hot butter cooks out its raw starch taste and lets it thicken evenly. If it clumps or is added without stirring, the stew will be lumpy and may taste floury.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, onion, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, onion, pepper, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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