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Giblet Soup
Take two sets of goose or fowl giblets. Prepare them in the same way as for GIBLET PIE, cutting the gizzard into small pieces about half an inch square, or it will not be tender until the rest is in rags, and put all into a stewpan with a slice of lean ham cut into dice, and a small piece of butter. Fry the giblets a few minutes; then add to them two quarts of good stock, an onion stuck with five or six cloves, two or three sprigs of marjoram, thyme, or winter savoury, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and a small tea-spoonful of bruised celery-seeds tied in a muslin bag. Simmer gently for two hours, then take out the giblets, and put them into a tureen. Strain the soup, and thicken it with one ounce of butter, mixed smoothly over the fire with a table-spoonful of flour until slightly browned, but not burned, and added gradually to the liquor. Let it boil for a quarter of an hour, then return the giblets to it for a few minutes, to get hot, and serve with toasted sippets. The giblets should be tender, but not too much boiled. Before putting them into the tureen they should all be cut into small pieces. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward brown giblet soup, and the only real difficulty is sourcing the giblets. Everything else is period vocabulary.
- What "giblets" meant hereVictorian giblets included far more than the modern supermarket bag: neck, heart, gizzard, liver, plus the pinions (wing tips), feet and often the head. Two sets from geese give a generous amount; two sets of chicken giblets will be thin, so ask a butcher for extra necks and wings to make up the weight.
- Skip the liver in the potLiver can turn bitter and grainy over two hours of simmering. It can be held back, fried separately at the end, and diced into the tureen with the rest, or left out entirely.
- The gizzard instruction is the hingeCutting the gizzard into half-inch pieces is not fussiness. It is dense muscle and takes far longer than heart or neck; in whole pieces it stays rubbery until everything else has collapsed. Peel off the tough inner lining first.
- Two quarts of stockTwo imperial quarts is about 2.3 litres; two US quarts about 1.9 litres (8 cups). The recipe specifies only 'good stock'.
- Winter savouryWinter savory, a hardy perennial with a peppery, thyme-like flavour, still sold at herb nurseries. Thyme is the easiest substitute and the recipe already offers it.
- Celery seedA small teaspoonful is potent; bruise it lightly and keep it in the bag so it can be pulled early if the flavour dominates.
- The thickeningThis is a brown roux -- 1 oz (28 g) butter to a tablespoon of flour, cooked to a nut colour. The recipe has the mixture added gradually to the liquor; either way, do it gradually or it will lump. The stated quarter-hour boil is worth keeping; it cooks out the raw flour taste.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of toasted or fried bread, served alongside or floated on top. Croutons are the same thing.
- YieldFour or five as written, as a first course. Skim the fat from the surface before thickening; goose giblets in particular render a good deal.
Giblet soup belongs to the thrift end of a large Victorian kitchen, where a goose or a pair of fowls was drawn at home and the neck, pinions, feet and gizzard were far too useful to discard. Its natural companion is giblet pie, which the recipe cross-references 14 the two dishes divided the same by-products between them. Michaelmas geese and Christmas birds made autumn and winter the season for it, and the strong flavour of the trimmings is precisely why the recipe leans on cloves, celery seed and a slice of ham rather than trying for delicacy. The practice has largely disappeared with the sale of oven-ready poultry: feet and pinions are no longer part of the bird a household buys, and the giblet bag, where it survives at all, holds a fraction of what a nineteenth-century cook had to work with.