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Kidney Stew

A stew made from sliced kidney, seasoned with pepper, salt, flour, and cooked slowly in stock or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter 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 ↓

Kidney Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the kidney and remove the core, then cut it into thin slices.

  2. Mix together the pepper, salt, and flour, then roll the kidney slices in the mixture.

Cook

  1. Brown the kidney quickly in the butter or bacon fat.

  2. Add the stock or water, skim well, and cook very slowly for two hours.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Mushroom + ketchuptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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

Kidney
Is the main ingredient, providing the meat and body of the stew.
Flour
Coats the slices and thickens the cooking liquid into a richer stew.
Butter or bacon fat
Carries heat for browning the kidney and adds rich flavour.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the stew's flavour.

The step that matters

Cook very slowly for two hours. Kidney is tough and can turn rubbery if boiled hard. Gentle, low heat over a long time breaks down the connective tissue and keeps the meat tender.

“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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