Beef Kidney with Chinese Mushrooms

History

Beef kidney has been prepared in Chinese kitchens for centuries, particularly in Cantonese cooking, where offal dishes represent resourceful use of the entire animal. The kidney was typically scored with a diagonal lattice, then stir-fried at high heat with aromatics and sauces to achieve a tender but firm texture. This technique traveled with Chinese emigration to North America beginning in the mid-1800s, when thousands of Chinese laborers arrived to work on railroads and in mining camps. Once settled, Chinese immigrants established restaurants and home kitchens that adapted their regional cuisines to available ingredients and American tastes, particularly in cities like San Francisco and New York. By the early 1900s, dried mushrooms and soy sauce—both essential to this dish—were being imported and sold at Chinese stores across North America, making traditional ingredients accessible to both Chinese cooks and curious American readers.

The 1914 recipe uses a braise rather than a high-heat stir-fry. The kidney is soaked half an hour in cold water with a handful of salt, cut small and fried in pork fat, then simmered with dried mushrooms, onion and soy sauce ("syou"). Why Bosse and Watanna chose that method is not recorded; What can be said is what the book does: it gives a braise, and a long one.

The dish appears in the Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914), co-authored by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna (the pen name of Winnifred Eaton), a pioneering work that introduced American housewives to East Asian cooking during a period of significant anti-Chinese sentiment. The cookbook's preface explicitly addressed Western anxiety about Chinese food, assuring readers that the ingredients were "simple and clean." This recipe is one of the earliest documented attempts to present Chinese kidney preparation to an American domestic audience, preserved in what is regarded as the first Asian-American cookbook published in North America.

Ingredients

• 1 beef kidney
• 1/4 pound dried mushrooms
• 1 small onion
• 1.5 teaspoonfuls salt
• dash cayenne pepper
• 2 tablespoonfuls chopped fat pork
• 3 tablespoonfuls syou

Instructions

1. Soak the kidney for half an hour in cold water with a handful of salt.
2. Cut the kidney into small pieces and fry in pork fat.
3. Wash the dried mushrooms in lukewarm water and pull off the stalks.
4. Soak the prepared mushrooms for ten minutes.
5. Add the mushrooms to the kidney with the chopped onion, one and one quarter teaspoonfuls of salt, and three tablespoonfuls of syou.
6. Cover tightly and boil very slowly for one hour, adding boiling water if it dries.
7. Serve with rice.