Skip to main content
Main

Beef Kidney

Sliced beef kidney fried and simmered in a mushroom ketchup gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Beef Kidney

Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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 ↓

Beef Kidney

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the kidney into thin slices.

  2. Flour the slices.

Fry and make the gravy

  1. Fry the slices until nicely browned.

  2. Remove excess fat from the pan and add butter.

  3. Pour in boiling water.

  4. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and mushroom ketchup.

  5. Let the gravy boil briefly.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the kidney.

  2. Serve.

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

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

  2. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Mushroom + ketchuptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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

Kidney
Forms the main meat, which is cut thin so it cooks through quickly and stays tender.
Flour
Coats the slices so they brown well and help thicken the gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for flavour once the pan fat is removed.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the slices until nicely browned. Browning through high heat creates savoury flavour compounds, while overcrowding or too little heat makes the slices steam and turn grey and tough. Dry, floured slices brown best.

“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.

More beef kidney recipes

Stew 16Fried 12in Gravy 8Stewed 5French 3 See all 39 →

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes