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Beef Kidney

Beef kidney slices fried and served with a sauce of butter, flour, water, mushroom ketchup, lemon juice, vinegar, herbs, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Beef Kidney

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 ↓

Beef Kidney

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the kidney

  1. Trim and slice the kidney.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, then dredge in flour.

  3. Fry the slices on both sides until cooked through.

  4. Remove the kidney from the pan and empty it.

Make the sauce

  1. In the same pan, melt butter, add flour, salt, and pepper.

  2. Pour in boiling water and simmer for 1 minute.

  3. Add mushroom catsup, lemon juice, and vinegar to taste.

  4. Optionally, add minced herbs and finely shredded onion.

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

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

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef kidney
Is the main protein, whose slices are cooked through and served in the sauce.
Flour
Coats the slices for browning and thickens the pan sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for frying and richness to the pan sauce.
Mushroom catsup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the slices on both sides until cooked through. Kidney is dense and can turn tough and rubbery if overcooked, while undercooked meat is unsafe. Frying in a hot pan with flour coating browns the surface for flavour while the slices cook through evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, flour, butter, mushroom, lemon, vinegar. 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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