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To Prepare Giblets
Do not use giblets from old fowls, nor from young unless thoroughly sound. Healthy liver has light color and uniform texture. Remove membranes, arteries and clotted blood around heart. Separate gall bladder from the liver, taking great care that bladder is not pierced. Cut fat and membranes from gizzard, make an incision through the thick muscle of gizzard, being careful not to cut membrane which holds grist. Peel muscle off. Wash giblets and cook until tender with neck and tips of wings, placing them in cold water and heating to boiling point. Stock is to be used for gravy. Cooked giblets themselves may be minced fine and added to the gravy. The smooth legs of a fowl less than a year old may be used. Scald with boiling water and skin and claw cases will peel off like a glove. Place in cold salted water and cook slowly. Three pairs of chicken feet will make a pint of jelly as fine, and just as nutritious as call's foot jelly.
This is a butchering-and-stock procedure rather than a dish: it turns the bag of odds and ends inside a whole bird into gravy stock, minced gravy meat, and if you want it, a clear jelly. The single instruction that matters is the gall bladder.
- The gall bladder firstOn a modern supermarket bird the gall bladder is usually already removed, but if a small green-black sac is still attached to the liver, cut it away with a margin of liver rather than trying to pull it free. A pierced gall bladder spreads bile that is bitter enough to ruin the whole pot, and no rinsing recovers it.
- What the giblets areHeart, liver, gizzard; the author simmers the neck and wing tips alongside them rather than counting them as giblets. The liver is normally kept out of long-simmered stock because it clouds and muddies it; simmer it briefly on its own, or add it only in the last few minutes if you intend to mince it into the gravy.
- The gizzard"Grist" is the grit and grain the bird has swallowed, held in a tough inner lining. Slit the thick muscle without cutting that lining, then peel the muscle away from it in one piece and discard the lining and contents. Gizzard needs the longest cooking of the lot, an hour or more, before it stops being rubbery.
- Cold water startStarting in cold water and bringing it slowly to the boil draws more soluble protein and gelatin into the liquid, which is what you want for gravy stock. Once it reaches a boil, hold it at a bare simmer; a hard rolling boil emulsifies fat and turns the stock cloudy.
- SoundnessThe warning about old fowls and unsound livers reads as a stand-in for the inspection a modern buyer takes for granted. Buy giblets that smell clean and look evenly coloured, keep them refrigerated, use them within a day, and cook them through to at least 165F, which they easily reach in the time the gizzard requires anyway.
- Chicken feetStill sold at Asian and Latin American markets and by many small poultry farms. Scald 30 seconds in boiling water, peel the skin and claw sheaths, then simmer several hours. The yield given, three pairs to a pint of jelly, is realistic for a rich, well-set gelatin.
- Calf's foot jellyThe comparison is to the standard invalid food of the era, made by boiling a calf's foot for gelatin. Chicken feet do the same job because both are rich in collagen; a modern cook would call the result simply a strongly gelled stock.