Home › The Principles of Cookery › Giblet Soup, Duck's
Giblet Soup, Duck's
Very good soup may be made of the giblets of ducks. The same directions may be followed as we have given for goose giblets, but as ducks are so much smaller, four sets of these must be used, where two sets only of goose giblets would be necessary.
This entry is a proportion note rather than a full method — Cassell's assumes you have the goose giblet soup recipe in front of you. What it does tell you is the ratio, and that is the part worth keeping.
- What a "set" of giblets meansIn Victorian usage the giblets of a bird generally comprised the neck, gizzard, heart, pinions (wing tips) and feet, and often the liver as well, though some recipes reserve the liver for other uses. A modern supermarket giblet bag is usually neck, heart, gizzard and liver only, so you may need extra necks or wings to get comparable body.
- The ratio is the recipeFour sets of duck giblets for every two of goose. A goose typically runs heavier than a duck, so the doubling is roughly by weight.
- Leave the liver out of the potLong simmering tends to make duck liver muddy the stock and cloud it. Cook it separately and slice it into the tureen at the end, or save it for something else.
- Brown first, then simmerMany period giblet soups begin by frying the giblets and onion in butter or dripping before adding water; without that step the soup is paler and thinner. Check the goose giblet recipe this entry refers to for the actual method.
- TimingGizzards and feet want 1½ to 2 hours at a bare simmer to give up their gelatine; hearts and necks are done sooner. Duck giblets are smaller than goose and will overcook into cotton if boiled hard, so keep the pot barely trembling.
- Skim the fat, and skim it properlyDuck renders a great deal of fat, and skimming during cooking was the usual period method. Chilling the strained stock overnight lifts the fat off in a solid disc, and the fat itself is worth keeping for potatoes.
- ThickeningSoups of this class are commonly finished with a brown roux or a little flour rubbed into butter, and seasoned with pepper and salt; some versions add a glass of sherry or Madeira. Add any wine off the heat so it does not turn harsh.
Giblet soup belongs to a whole class of Victorian cookery built on the parts of a bird nobody would sell you separately: the neck, the gizzard, the feet, the wing tips. When a household roasted a goose or duck the giblets came attached, and the cook was expected to find a use for them, which is why Cassell's treats duck giblet soup as a footnote to the goose version rather than a dish in its own right. The economy is real — gizzards and feet are collagen-rich and yield a stock with more body than the breast would. The convention of reckoning giblets in "sets" rather than by weight suggests something about the period kitchen: the unit was the bird rather than the scale. Poultry feet became far less common in British and American retail butchery over the twentieth century as birds increasingly arrived dressed and packaged, which makes this soup harder to reproduce faithfully now.