Most people have morning rituals. Mine is to wake up, be depressed by the news, switch over to Radio 3, and discuss evening plans with my partner.
“What are you cooking tonight?”
“Lamb kidneys.”
“I’ll make a fall-back.”
That’s the problem with cooking with the unfashionable bits of an animal – people assume the resulting meal will be offal. (That joke works better if you read it out loud. A bit)
Nonetheless, when Delia commands, I must obey, even if my partner sighs and turns to lasagne. It is strangely ironic that originally, offal – rather like horse – was a peasant food: something you ate because the lord of the manor had gobbled up the leg, shank, rump and so on, leaving you only with the entrails and eyeballs. But although you can buy kidneys in most butchers, as I learn when cooking this meal, you really can’t skimp on price and quality.
A cheap cut of lamb that has perhaps not had the best life might taste a little less good than a lamb that has lived the life of Riley, but it won’t be the difference between an edible meal and inedible meal. But when you cut open the kidney of a lamb that has been poorly treated and fed on chemicals, your nose will know about it, and when you eat it, you will know about it even better. So, go upmarket if you are buying kidneys. (This is also true if you are on the black market for organ donors, I’m told.)
Opening up and coring your kidneys ensures they will be lovely and soft, and also is a good test about whether you are too squeamish to be a meat-eater. They really do look like kidneys, which I’m afraid I found incredibly satisfying because I am (a) bloodthirsty and (b) mentally about five years old. Nonetheless, I’m sure this will be off‑putting for some.
Certainly, this marked the point in the evening when my partner went from umming and ahhing about whether to eat them to phoning round takeaways – although that may have had more to do with the smell.
And boy, do they smell.
Delia recommends cooking kidneys in summer, when they are “plumpest”. My suspicion is there is another reason for this, which Delia is too polite to mention. Namely that it is immediately clear when you cut a kidney open that they are the way that the body purifies its fluids and produces urine. Open windows are a must. In cold weather, this presents you with a terrible choice: choke or freeze.
There are two ways round this, but the way I find congenial in these increasingly cold months is to cook something else at the same time, as the smell of bread or roast potatoes or whatever reduces the stink.
Provided your kidneys are cored and washed, the final taste should have no trace of urine – with a texture very similar to more fashionable joints of meat, without that odd grainy and metallic taste that, say, liver has.
Kidneys also take on a great deal of flavour, making them a superb meat for curries, or, in this case, red wine and mustards. They are also relatively quick to make – the coring process and the cooking itself can easily be done of a weekday evening, making them a good addition to your weekly meal. I’d even say they were my favourite unfashionable cut of meat. The worst is liver. Even Delia can’t make that taste anything other than offal.
- Stephen Bush is cooking his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year; You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline
- Stephen Bush is a writer and columnist for the New Statesman @stephenkb
