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Giblet Sauce
Drain the liquid from the pan in which the turkey was roasted. Take six tablespoons of the fat, strain the latter through a fine sieve. Return the strained fat to the dripping pan and place on the range. Add seven tablespoons of flour, stir to a smooth paste and brown richly, being careful not to burn the mixture. Then pour on slowly while stirring constantly, three cups of stock (in which the neck, pinions and giblets were cooked). Bring it to the boiling point, and season to taste. Chop the giblets very fine, first removing the tough parts of the gizzard; then reheat them in sauce, and serve.
A roux-based pan gravy built on turkey giblet stock, from the November Thanksgiving menu. The proportions are unusually fat- and flour-heavy by modern taste, and the finished sauce will be thick.
- Start the stock firstThe recipe assumes you already have three cups of broth from simmering the neck, pinions (wing tips) and giblets. Put them in a pan with water, an onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns when the turkey goes into the oven and let it barely simmer for an hour and a half.
- Leave out the liverSimmer heart, gizzard and neck for the stock, but add the liver only for the last 10 minutes or cook it separately. Long boiling makes it bitter and chalky, and it will muddy the whole sauce.
- Six tablespoons fat, seven flourThat is roughly a 1:1 roux by volume and will give a heavy, old-style gravy. For a sauce that coats a spoon rather than a plate, use 4 tablespoons of each to three cups of stock.
- "Brown richly" means patienceCook the roux over medium heat, stirring, until it is the colour of a hazelnut shell — five to eight minutes. This is the hinge of the recipe: an underbrowned roux tastes of raw flour, and a scorched one turns the gravy bitter and has to be thrown out.
- Strain the fat, and skim itPouring the pan drippings into a heatproof measuring jug and letting it settle for a few minutes separates fat from the dark juices more reliably than a sieve alone. Keep the juices and add them to the stock; use the clear fat for the roux.
- Stock temperatureWarm the stock before adding it and pour in a little at a time, whisking each addition smooth before the next. Adding the liquid gradually, rather than in a rush, is the surest guard against lumps.
- The gizzardThe "tough parts" are the tough silverskin and connective tissue; cut them away and discard. Chop the remaining meat and the heart finely, add at the end, and heat through only — a minute or two.
- Season lastRoast drippings and reduced giblet stock are both salty, so taste only after the sauce has thickened. Yield is about 3 cups, enough for eight to ten servings.
Giblet gravy is the thrifty half of a roast bird: the neck, wing tips, heart and gizzard are unsuitable for the platter but full of gelatine and flavour, and boiling them down gives the cook a stock that costs nothing. The word giblet is generally traced to Old French gibelet, recorded as a dish of game, though its further origin is uncertain; giblet pie appears in English cookery by the seventeenth century, with giblet soup following largely in the eighteenth. Here the giblets are cooked separately in stock, nothing wasted, and the pan itself used as the saucepan. The heavy flour-and-fat roux is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American gravy, when a sauce was expected to be substantial enough to hold up mashed potato and stuffing.