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Kidney Soup

A kidney soup made by browning kidneys in butter and flour, stewing them in gravy, adding soup stock, and thickening with browned flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Kidney Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the kidneys

  1. Cut the kidneys in half.

  2. Fry the kidneys in butter and flour until slightly browned.

  3. Stew the kidneys in 1 quart of highly-seasoned gravy until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Add 2 quarts of soup to the pot.

  2. Thicken the soup with browned flour and butter.

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 + 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
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in the gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor, and helps the flour brown during frying.
Flour
Browns in the butter and then thickens the soup, giving it body and a deeper color.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with browned flour and butter. Flour thickens only when its starch is evenly dispersed and heated in liquid. Mixing it into the butter first and stirring it into the soup prevents lumps and a floury taste, and cooking it through lets the starch swell fully.

“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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