Giblet Sauce
If brown sauce is to be served with roast chicken or turkey, boil the giblets three or four hours; mash or chop them, and add them to the sauce.
A two-line instruction that assumes you already have brown sauce on the stove and a bird in the oven. The only real decisions are which giblets go in and how long they cook.
- What giblets meansThe packet inside a whole bird: neck, heart, gizzard and liver. Modern supermarket birds often come with them removed, so ask the butcher or buy a bag of chicken hearts and gizzards separately.
- Hold back the liverNeck, heart and gizzard are tough and reward long cooking. Liver goes grainy and can turn bitter with long simmering, so poach or saute it separately for a few minutes and chop it in at the end. The original makes no such distinction.
- Three or four hours is generousSimmered gently in water or stock, gizzard and neck are usually tender in 60-90 minutes, so the original's timing is longer than needed. Taste at an hour and stop when a gizzard yields to a knife.
- Keep the cooking liquidThe original says nothing about the broth, only about the meat, but the liquid is worth keeping: strain it and use it to thin the brown sauce or to deglaze the roasting pan.
- Brown sauce, 1900 senseBrown sauce, period sense -- A roux cooked to a nut brown, moistened with brown stock and simmered down. Any well-made pan gravy stands in. Chop the giblets fine rather than mashing if you want a sauce with texture rather than a puree.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, one bird's giblets, chopped, will flavour a couple of cups of sauce; for a large turkey you may want a second bag of hearts and gizzards.
- Season at the endLong-simmered giblet broth reduces and concentrates, so salt the finished sauce, not the pot. A spoonful of the roasting juices and a grind of pepper is usually all it needs.
Giblet sauce belongs to the older logic of the kitchen in which nothing arriving with the bird was thrown away: the neck and gizzard would have gone into a small pot early on, so that by the time the roast was resting there was a broth to build gravy on. The word giblet reaches English from Old French gibelet, a word whose own origin the OED treats as uncertain, and it came to name the edible odds and ends of poultry specifically, appearing in giblet pies and giblet soups as well as sauces. Its briefness here is telling about the book's form: Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf pages assume a cook who already knows how to make a brown sauce and needs only to be told what to put in it. The instruction survives in the American Thanksgiving giblet gravy, which is essentially this recipe with the pan drippings named outright.