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Gravy Made Without Meat, for Fowls
Take the feet, necks, livers, and gizzards of the fowls, wash them thoroughly, cut them into small pieces, and put them into a saucepan, with a bunch of savoury herbs, a small onion, half a slice of bread, toasted brown and hard, but not burnt, a salt-spoonful of salt, half a salt-spoonful of pepper, and a pint and a half of water. Simmer very gently for an hour or more. Pour the fat from the pan which has been under the fowl, strain the gravy to it, stir it well, strain it again into the saucepan; add a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, if this is liked, and serve as hot as possible. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for a couple of fowls.
A giblet gravy under another name: "without meat" means without butcher's meat, not without animal matter. The whole point is to get a fowl-flavoured sauce from the parts already in hand plus the roasting-pan drippings.
- Start the stock before the birds go inAn hour of gentle simmering has to happen while the fowls roast, so the giblets go on the stove first. The finished gravy is nothing more than that liquor married to the pan juices at the last minute.
- Feet need preparingScald them briefly, peel off the yellow outer skin, and clip the nails before they go in the pot. With no roux and no reduction to speak of, the feet and necks supply most of what body the gravy has.
- The liver is the riskAn hour of boiling turns liver grainy and faintly bitter and clouds the stock. One remedy is to hold it back and add it only for the last ten minutes, or to leave it out altogether and use it elsewhere.
- Salt-spoonfulAbout a quarter teaspoon, so a half salt-spoonful of pepper is an eighth. These are starting amounts for roughly 30 fl oz of water that will barely reduce; season again at the end.
- Pint and a halfAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 30 fl oz, a little under four US cups. Keep the simmer at a bare tremble and skim it, or you will emulsify the fat and get a cloudy gravy.
- The toasted breadHalf a slice, toasted dark brown and dry, is doing two jobs: colouring the liquid and giving it a very slight thickness. It must not be burnt, or the whole pot tastes of scorch. It was one common Victorian alternative to browned flour.
- "Pour the fat from the pan"The instruction reads oddly. The likeliest sense is to pour off the clear fat, then bring the strained stock together with the browned residue in the pan. That sediment is where the roast flavour lives.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup. It is a thin, dark, very salty mushroom extract, still sold by a few British firms. A teaspoon of soy or a dash of Worcestershire gives a comparable savoury lift; add it off the heat and taste before adding more salt.
- YieldEnough for two roast fowls, as the recipe states. It is deliberately unthickened; if you want it to coat, whisk in a little beurre mani he ppot -- whisk in a little beurre mani f at the end rather than flouring the pot.
Cassell's is being precise, not coy, with "without meat": a proper English gravy of the period was built on beef or veal, often a pound or more of gravy beef stewed down, and a poultry dinner that had to stand on its own giblets was a piece of economy worth naming. The stated cost of twopence makes the point. Toasted crust as a colouring and thickening agent runs right through nineteenth-century British cookery, from beggar's gravies up to Mrs Beeton. Mushroom ketchup, offered here as an optional flourish, was the standard bottled umami of the English kitchen long before tomato ketchup displaced it in the popular mind; Victorian larders kept it beside the anchovy essence and the walnut pickle. The assumption that feet, necks, gizzards and livers arrive attached to the bird tells you the fowls were bought whole and undressed, which is the single biggest practical gap between this recipe and a supermarket chicken.