Giblet Soup
1 pint dried green English peas. 1 pound giblets. 1 dozen cloves. 1 small piece red pepper. Nearly 1 gallon water.
Boil peas slowly seven hours. Add giblets, spices, and salt to taste, two hours before dinner. When peas are dissolved, strain through sieve; cut giblets into dice and return to soup; boil up and serve. Will be enough for six or eight persons.--Mrs. R. R.
A thrift soup: dried peas cooked to a purée, enriched with the parts of the bird nobody serves whole. The proportions are sound, but the timings belong to a coal range with a permanently warm back corner.
- The peas"Dried green English peas" are whole dried green peas. Green split peas are the same pea, dried and split, and will break down faster. A pint measure of dried peas is about 14 oz by weight.
- Seven hours is a stove, not a ruleThat length assumes unsoaked whole peas on a range that was lit anyway. Soaked overnight, whole peas collapse in about 2 hours of gentle simmering and split peas in 45 to 60 minutes. Judge by whether they have dissolved, which is the state the recipe actually asks for.
- Which gibletsA pound would most often mean gizzards, hearts and necks from turkey or chicken, though the recipe does not specify. Leave the liver out or add it only in the last ten minutes; boiled at length it turns grainy and clouds the pot.
- Two hours for the gibletsGizzards genuinely need 1½ to 2 hours to become tender enough to dice, so the instruction stands. Hearts and necks are done sooner and can be lifted out early if you want them neat.
- A dozen clovesThat is assertive by current taste and cloves only get louder as the pot reduces. Tie them in muslin with the pepper so they can be pulled once the flavour is where you want it, or start with six.
- Nearly a gallon of waterRoughly 15 cups, which allows for hours of open evaporation. If you are simmering covered for two or three hours instead of seven, start with about 10 cups and add more only if the purée is too thick to pour.
- Straining"Strain through sieve" means pushing the softened peas through to make a purée, not discarding them. A food mill or a stick blender does the same work; keep the giblet cooking liquid, which carries most of the flavour.
- Seasoning and yieldSalt is left entirely to the cook, and pea purée absorbs a surprising amount of it. Serves six to eight as a first course, four as a meal.
Giblet soup was a standard of English and Anglo-American cookery well before this book, built on the principle that the neck, heart and gizzard of a bird are too good to waste and too tough to roast. Pairing them with dried peas gives a second economy: peas kept through winter and needed no refrigeration, so the soup could be made at any season from the offcuts of whatever fowl had been killed. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from a wide circle of Virginia housekeepers, and the initialled attributions such as "Mrs. R. R." are how the book credits them. The long unattended boil is a signature of that kitchen: a wood or coal range held heat all day whether or not you wanted it, and a pot at the back cost nothing to keep going.