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Croutons of Kidney

A sauce of butter, flour, kidney stock, pepper, and salt, served over fried croutons with mushrooms and kidney.

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 ↓

Croutons of Kidney

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for one minute.

  3. Gradually add the kidney stock, stirring until smooth.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the cooked kidneys and chopped mushrooms, cooking until the mushrooms are tender.

  2. Serve the mixture piled on fried croutons and sprinkle with brown bread crumbs.

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. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Sheep's kidneys
Provide the main meat and the rich, distinctive flavour of the dish.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and savoury earthiness as they soften in the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked briefly in the butter.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the butter and cook for one minute. Cooking the flour in fat removes its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. Adding stock too quickly, or without stirring, can leave lumps in the sauce.

“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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