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Sheep's Kidneys, with Champagne

A sautéed kidney dish flavored with bacon, butter, parsley, shallot, flour, champagne, lemon, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sheep's Kidneys, with Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skins from the kidneys and slice them to the thickness of a halfpenny.

  2. Fry the bacon squares in a skillet with the butter until golden.

Cook

  1. Add the kidneys to the skillet, stirring frequently to cook evenly.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, parsley, and shallot.

  3. Sprinkle with flour and stir with a wooden spoon.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the hot champagne without boiling.

  2. Add lemon juice and cayenne, ensuring the sauce is well-seasoned.

Serve

  1. Serve the kidneys in a dish with a hollow spoon.

  2. Allow the sauce to boil once to cook the flour.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's kidneys
Form the main body of the dish, cooked tender in a quick sauté.
Bacon
Adds savoury fat and flavour to the pan that the kidneys cook in.
Butter
Carries the fat for frying and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a sauce when heated with the liquid.
White champagne
Adds acidity and liquid, deglazing the pan and lightening the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce once to cook the flour. Flour must be heated long enough to cook out its raw taste and thicken the sauce. Boiling it briefly does this, but prolonged boiling can toughen the kidneys and make the sauce too thick.

“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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