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Gravy (Pour off liquid in pan)
Pour off liquid in pan in which chicken has been roasted. From liquid skim off four tablespoons fat; return fat to pan, and brown with four tablespoons flour; add two cups stock in which giblets, neck, and tips of wings have been cooked. Cook five minutes, season with salt and pepper, then strain. The remaining fat may be used, in place of butter, for frying potatoes, or for basting when roasting another chicken. For Giblet Gravy, add to the above, giblets (heart, liver, and gizzard) finely chopped.
A standard roux gravy built in the roasting pan, sized for a whole roast chicken. The proportions are the classic one-to-one fat and flour for a moderately thick gravy.
- The hinge: brown the rouxThe flour must cook in the fat until it takes colour and smells nutty, roughly two to three minutes over medium heat. Add the stock too early and the gravy tastes of raw flour; let it go too dark and it loses thickening power.
- Giblet stock, started earlyThe two cups of stock come from simmering the neck, wing tips, heart and gizzard in lightly salted water — start it when the bird goes into the oven and give it an hour or more. The liver is best added only for the last ten minutes, or cooked separately, since long simmering makes it bitter and muddies the stock.
- Deglaze before you skimThe recipe says to pour the liquid off, but scrape the browned fond loose from the pan first with a little of the stock. That sediment carries most of the flavour.
- Fat measurementFour tablespoons of fat to four of flour to two cups of liquid gives a pourable gravy. If the bird has yielded less fat than that, make up the difference with butter rather than reducing the flour.
- Lump insuranceAdd the stock in stages, whisking smooth after each addition, and use warm stock rather than cold. The instruction to strain at the end will catch any lumps, and is also worth doing to catch bits of skin.
- Five minutes is the minimumCook five minutes at a bare simmer so the starch fully gelatinises and thickens. Ten does no harm and improves the texture.
- SeasoningRoasting-pan drippings and reduced giblet stock can both be salty. Season at the end, after the gravy has reduced to the thickness you want.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough for a roast chicken serving four to six.
Pan gravy of this kind — fat and flour browned in the roasting tin, slackened with stock made from the parts of the bird nobody serves — is the plain economy of the nineteenth-century kitchen rather than anything invented for this book. Birds commonly arrived with neck, giblets and wing tips attached, and a cook who threw those away was wasting stock. Fannie Farmer's characteristic contribution is the arithmetic: four tablespoons fat, four of flour, two cups liquid, stated as a fixed ratio rather than left to judgement, a habit of level measurement long associated with the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, which first appeared in 1896. The closing note that leftover fat serves for frying potatoes or basting the next bird belongs to the same habit of mind. Giblet gravy remains the American holiday form, and the naming of the three parts — heart, liver, gizzard — suggests the book expected readers who might not know which pieces were meant.