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GIBLETS, WITH APPLES (a German recipe)
Prepare the giblets as before. Take eight large apples, peel, core, and quarter them, and let them boil until they are tender, but unbroken, with two table-spoonfuls of sugar, four table-spoonfuls of water, and the thinly-peeled rind of a lemon. Put a piece of butter, about the size of an egg, into a saucepan, mix with it, very smoothly, a table-spoonful of flour, and stir it over the fire until slightly browned. Add three table-spoonfuls of the apple-juice, and three table-spoonfuls of the liquid in which the giblets were stewed. Let this boil, then add it to the rest of the giblet gravy. Wash two table-spoonfuls of dried currants, and strew them over the giblets. Heat all together, colour rather darkly with a few drops of browning (see BROWNING), and arrange on a hot dish, with the giblets in the centre, the pieces of apple round, and the gravy, with the currants, poured over all. Time, about two hours. Probable cost, giblets, 6d. to 1s. per set; apples, 8d. per dozen. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A dish of stewed poultry giblets in a browned-flour gravy, served with a ring of poached apples and dried currants. The recipe assumes you have already read Cassell's directions for preparing giblets, so the first line hides most of the work.
- What "prepare the giblets as before" meansA set of giblets in this period meant the neck, gizzard, heart, liver, wing pinions and often the scalded feet of a goose or duck. They are cleaned, the gizzard split and its gritty lining peeled away, then simmered in seasoned water with an onion until tender, roughly 1.5 to 2 hours for goose. Add the liver only in the last ten minutes or it turns grainy and bitters the stock.
- A set of giblets todaySupermarket giblet packs are small and rarely include feet or pinions. Allow the giblets from two or three birds, or buy chicken or duck hearts and gizzards separately from a butcher and add a couple of wings for body.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 50-55 g. With a tablespoon of flour that gives a fairly loose roux, which is what you want here, since it is thinning a large quantity of giblet stock.
- BrowningCassell's browning is burnt-sugar caramel colouring, cooked to near-black and let down with water. Modern gravy browning or a few drops of dark soy do the same job. It is cosmetic only; skipping it costs nothing but colour.
- Choosing the applesThe instruction that decides the dish is "tender, but unbroken." A Bramley or other culinary apple will collapse into sauce in this syrup. Use a firm variety that holds its shape, poach at a bare simmer, and lift the quarters out as soon as a knife point slides in, around 8 to 12 minutes.
- The poaching syrupTwo tablespoons of sugar to four of water is barely a syrup and will not cover eight apples. Use a wide pan so the quarters sit in one layer, turn them once, and add a splash more water if the pan threatens to dry out. Three tablespoons of the resulting juice go into the sauce; the rest is worth keeping.
- CurrantsDried currants, meaning Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Washing them is a legacy of unwashed, sanded dried fruit; a brief soak in warm water to plump them is more useful now.
- Timing and yieldThe stated two hours is essentially the giblet simmer; the apples and sauce take twenty minutes alongside. Serves four or five as written, with plain boiled potatoes or dumplings to take up the gravy.
This is a lightly anglicised Gänseklein, the German household dish of goose giblets stewed and served with fruit, often around the time a goose was killed and the bird itself reserved for roasting. Pairing poultry offal with cooked apples, pears or dried fruit is characteristic of northern and eastern German cooking, where sweet-sour accompaniments to rich meat were common, and the currants strewn over the top belong to the same habit. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s for an English middle-class readership, gathered such recipes from across Europe and labelled them by nation. Its inclusion here also reflects a plainer motive: giblets cost sixpence to a shilling a set, and a book that priced every dish for the housekeeper had good reason to show what could be done with the cheapest parts of the bird.