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Beef Kidney

A sautéed beef kidney dish flavored with ketchup, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Beef Kidney

Why it works: Ketchup and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,435 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Beef Kidney

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the kidney into slices.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and ketchup.

Cook

  1. Brown in a frying pan.

  2. Add a little flour and water.

  3. Let it stew gently for some time.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Ketchup + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Beef + ketchuptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

Beef kidney
Forms the main body of the dish and is cooked until tender in the sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity, and helps colour and flavour the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce that clings to the kidney.

The step that matters

Browning the kidney. Searing the slices in a hot pan builds browned, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pan or leaving the meat wet causes steaming instead, which gives a grey, bland surface.

“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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