Beef Kidney with Chinese Mushrooms

History

Beef kidney has long been cooked in Chinese kitchens, and in Cantonese cooking especially, where offal dishes make resourceful use of the whole animal. The kidney is typically scored with a diagonal lattice, then stir-fried hard and fast with aromatics and sauces so that it comes out tender but still firm. That technique traveled with Chinese emigration to North America from the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the early 1900s dried mushrooms and soy sauce — both essential to this dish — were being imported and sold at Chinese stores across the continent.

The 1914 receipt 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, which the book renders as "syou." Why the authors 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 of 1914, written by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna, the pen name of Winnifred Eaton, and aimed at American home cooks during a period of open anti-Chinese feeling. The preface addresses that feeling directly, telling the reader: "When it is known how simple and clean are the ingredients used to make up these Oriental dishes, the Westerner will cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land." An earlier version of this note quoted that sentence with a word missing.

Ingredients

• 1 beef kidney
• 1/4 pound dried mushrooms
• 1 small onion
• 1 1/2 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.