Home › Soup Stock › Giblet Soup
Giblet Soup
Clean either chicken or goose or duck giblets, and cut the gizzard into 1/2-inch cubes. Put all into a stewpan containing a small piece of lean ham cut into dice. Fry the giblets a few minutes, then add 2 quarts of good stock, an onion stuck with cloves, thyme, or parsley; 2 sprigs of marjoram, a few celery seeds tied in a muslin bag, a teaspoonful of pepper. Simmer gently for two hours, then remove the giblets and put them into a tureen. Strain the soup, and thicken with a tablespoonful of flour cooked with one of butter until slightly browned. Let the soup boil for fifteen minutes, then return the giblets long enough to get hot, and serve with toasted sippets.
A clear, well-flavoured stock soup built on the parts of the bird that get discarded. The one thing to watch is the liver: it does not belong in the two-hour simmer.
- What counts as gibletsHeart, gizzard, neck and (traditionally) liver. The liver turns bitter and grainy over a long simmer, so either leave it out or cook it separately for a few minutes and slice it into the tureen at the end. Supermarket birds often come with a small giblet packet; the recipe gives no quantity, so for 2 quarts of stock you will probably need the giblets from two or three chickens, rather fewer from a goose.
- Cleaning the gizzardSplit it, turn out the grit, and peel away the tough inner lining before dicing. Skipping this is the usual reason a giblet soup tastes of sand.
- StewpanA straight-sided saucepan or a small Dutch oven, 4 quarts or larger. The initial frying wants a wide base so the giblets and ham brown rather than steam.
- The hamThe recipe gives no size; a small piece of lean ham can be read as about 2 oz, cut into small dice. Heavily smoked ham will dominate the finished soup, so a mild or unsmoked cut is safer.
- PepperA full teaspoonful of pepper in 2 quarts is assertive by modern taste. Start with half and adjust at the end. Note that no salt is specified at all, on the assumption the stock and ham carry it -- taste before serving.
- AromaticsThyme or parsley, marjoram and celery seed can all go into the muslin bag with the seeds, which makes straining simpler. An onion stuck with cloves means whole cloves pressed into a peeled onion; the recipe does not say how many.
- The thickening1 tablespoon flour cooked in 1 tablespoon butter to a light brown roux, then whisked into the hot strained soup. Fifteen minutes of boiling afterwards is not padding: it cooks out the raw flour taste and lets any scum be skimmed.
- Reheating the gibletsTwo or three minutes in the finished soup is enough. Gizzard that has already had two hours of gentle simmering will only toughen with further boiling.
- Sippets and yieldSippets are small triangles or cubes of bread, toasted or fried in butter. The recipe gives no yield; 2 quarts of soup would serve roughly six.