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Giblets
Heart, liver and gizzard constitute the giblets, and to these the neck is usually added. Wash them; put them in cold water and cook until tender. This will take several hours. Serve with the chicken; or mash the liver, mince the heart and gizzard and add them to the brown sauce. Save the stock in which they are cooked for making the sauce.
A working note rather than a formal recipe, and useful once you separate the parts by cooking time. The instruction to simmer everything together for hours is the one thing to ignore.
- Cook the liver separatelyHeart, gizzard and neck are dense working muscle and need 1 to 1½ hours at a bare simmer. Liver needs 5 to 10 minutes and turns grainy, grey and faintly bitter if held any longer; poach it at the end, or in a separate small pan.
- "Several hours" is far too long"Several hours" is longer than needed -- on a modern burner gizzards are usually fork-tender inside about 90 minutes, and beyond that they begin to shred and cloud the stock.
- Check the liver before it goes inAny patch stained yellow-green means bile from a ruptured gall bladder; cut it away generously or the whole panful will be bitter. Trim the tough silver membrane and any fat from the gizzard as well.
- Cold water start, and keep it lowStarting cold and bringing it up slowly draws out more gelatin, which is the point of saving the liquid. Skim the grey foam that rises in the first ten minutes and hold the pot at a shiver, not a rolling boil.
- Season the stockThe original gives no aromatics. A slice of onion, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and a light hand with salt cost nothing and make the sauce.
- "Brown sauce"In a book of this period that means a roux of butter and flour cooked to a nut colour, let down with stock — here, the giblet liquid. Roughly 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of stock gives a gravy consistency.
- YieldAs a rough guide, the minced giblets from one chicken will enrich somewhere around a cup and a half of sauce; a turkey's will stretch considerably further.
- StorageCooked giblets and their stock keep three or four days refrigerated, and the stock freezes well. If you are stuffing a bird, the giblets are best cooked the day before so the sauce can be made while the roast rests.
Giblets are the edible offal of a bird — the word comes from Old French gibelet, usually explained as a dish or stew of game, though the origin is not certain — and for much of the history of Anglo-American cooking they arrived attached to the bird because the bird arrived whole, often still with feet and head. A cook who bought a chicken bought all of it, and a page like this exists because throwing away the neck and gizzard would have been unthinkable rather than because the dish needed explaining. The loose-leaf format favours exactly this kind of brief reference entry: not a dish in its own right but a technique assumed to sit beside a roast fowl. The habit survives in the paper bag of giblets tucked inside a supermarket turkey, now often discarded.