Giblet Gravy
Boil neck, gizzard and wing tips together until tender. Pour off excess of fat in pan in which poultry has been roasted; add enough stock from the gizzard and neck to make 3 cups of gravy. Chop gizzard, liver and heart and add; then add 1 teaspoon finely cut onion, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, 2 tablespoons flour mixed with a little cold water and if not sufficiently brown add 1 teaspoon caramel. Boil 3 minutes.
A straightforward pan gravy built on giblet stock, written for cooks who assumed a bird arrived with its neck and organs attached. A few proportions and one ingredient need translating.
- Buy the giblets separatelyMany supermarket birds no longer include neck, gizzard, heart and liver, and wing tips are rarely sold on their own. Ask the butcher for a bag of chicken or turkey giblets, or freeze them from previous birds.
- The liver is not boiledNote that the liver is absent from the list of things simmered until tender — only neck, gizzard and wing tips go in the pot. The gizzard needs 45–60 minutes; the heart about 30; the liver turns grainy and bitter with long cooking and is best sautéed briefly in a little of the pan fat, then chopped in at the end.
- "Caramel" means browning liquidThis is caramel colour — sugar cooked to near-black and thinned with water, sold in the period as gravy browning and today as Kitchen Bouquet or Gravy Master. A teaspoon of dark soy or a spoonful of the darkest pan scrapings does the same work.
- The flour is on the light sideTwo tablespoons of flour to 3 cups of liquid gives a gravy barely thicker than broth. For a sauce that coats, use 4 to 6 tablespoons, mixed smooth with cold water before it meets the hot stock.
- Boil 3 minutes is a minimum, not a targetA flour-and-water slurry needs a few minutes at a simmer to lose its raw taste and reach full thickening power. Five to eight minutes at a gentle bubble, stirring, is better; the gravy will also thicken further as it stands.
- Salt after the stock reducesGiblet stock concentrates as it simmers, and the roasting pan already carries salt from the bird. Add the teaspoon of salt at the end, tasting, rather than up front.
- "Pour off excess of fat"Leave roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of fat in the pan for flavour and the browned drippings; note that the recipe thickens with a cold-water flour slurry rather than a roux, so the fat is not needed to carry the flour. Scrape the bottom of the roasting pan hard while the stock is going in; the fond is most of the flavour.
- YieldThree cups makes roughly eight to ten servings alongside a roast bird.
Giblets — from the Old French gibelet, a game stew, though the word's ultimate origin is uncertain — were for centuries the cook's compensation for a bird's inedible parts: the neck, the muscular gizzard, the heart, the liver, and the wing tips that would only char in the oven. Nothing in that list is worth serving on its own, but simmered together they make a dark, gelatinous stock that turns roasting-pan drippings into gravy, and versions of this recipe appear widely in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under the roast turkey or roast chicken. The gravy browning called for here is also a period marker: bottled caramel colouring was a common grocery item.