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Kidney Soup

A soup made with kidneys, butter, flour, and gravy.

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 them briefly in butter and flour.

Make the soup

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

  2. Add 2 quarts more of the soup.

  3. 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
Form the main body of the soup and become tender through slow stewing.
Flour
Coats the kidneys when fried and, browned, thickens the soup.
Butter
Fries the kidneys and browns with the flour to add richness and flavour.
Highly-seasoned gravy soup
Provides the liquid base and the main savoury flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Stew the kidneys until tender. Kidney is tough if stewed too briefly or boiled hard. Gentle, sustained simmering breaks down the connective tissue, so the kidneys soften without becoming rubbery.

“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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