Last week my friend Aelfwyn gifted me a pig kidney as part of a package of meat I was buying. She didn’t want it, but could I use it? Sure! I said, never having had kidney in my life, except as part of steak and kidney pie in pubs.
I started the hunt for a suitable medieval recipe but it turns out that medieval people didn’t eat kidneys very much – or at least the people wealthy enough to have cookbooks don’t seem to have eaten them. Apicius to the rescue!
This 4th or 5th C cookbook named for Apicius has a recipe for kidneys. It does not specify the species, which made my pig kidney a perfectly legitimate candidate for this redaction. The recipe is found in Book VII (The Gourmet), recipe VIII, and there are also recipes for sow’s udder and pork liver as well as ham and other pig-based dishes in this chapter, so my belief that pig kidney could have been used is reinforced. My translation from the Latin comes from the Flower and Rosenbaum edition from 1958. There are newer translations, but this remains my favourite because it is just the right size for using in the kitchen (and I have two copies so fewer concerns about spills on the pages).
Grilled or Roasted Kidneys. Cut them open, stretch them, and stuff them with ground pepper, pine-kernels an very finely chopped coriander, also ground fennel-seed. Then close the kidneys, sew together, wrap in sausage-skin and brown in oil and liquamen; afterwards roast in the oven (clibanus) or grill.
What I did: Cut them open, realized they had thick chewy white vein thingys thathad been the subject of grossness on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy I overheard my daughter watching a few days ago. Really? A doctor doesn’t know what that is and how to deal with it? I cut away as much as I could, then filled one side with whole pine nuts, a handful of chopped cilantro (to me coriander is the cilantro seed, which made no sense chopped), ground some dried fennel seed in my mortar and pestle then added it, and ground lots of pepper over it all. Then I sewed the kidney back together using ordinary thread and a tapestry needle (because was handy and it has a big eye since I was working without my glasses). By omentum, I believe Apicius meant omentum, a piece of fatty abdominal tissue that is used to wrap other foods. I didn’t have any on hand and didn’t feel like trying to find some at the Chinese grocery store (which sometimes has it), so I paid homage to this instruction by wrapping a piece of sausage casing a couple of times around the kidney then tying it in place. I browned the kidney in a mix of vegetable oil and Thai fish sauce, a salty concoction made with anchovies that is a reasonable substitute for liquamen. I don’t have a clibanus, which is an earthenware container with a lid that can be used for baking, so I simply put a heavy lid on the pan I had been using to brown the kidney, turned down the heat, and let it finish cooking.
It turned out to be surprisingly decent. The sewing thread pulled out easily without pulling apart the kidney. There is a nice peppery bite along with the fennel flavour. If I were to do this again, I might try to add more pine nuts.
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