Giblet Sauce
Take the liver, heart, gizzard and neck of a chicken, wash and boil in salted water. Let boil till tender. Take them out with a skimmer and chop into coarse pieces. Put them back, add a little butter substitute and thicken to a cream. Pepper and salt, boil a few minutes and serve.
A plain giblet gravy of the kind made alongside a roast bird, thickened in its own cooking liquor rather than in pan drippings. The recipe leaves out quantities entirely, so the proportions are worth fixing before you start.
- Butter substituteThe phrase points to margarine or a vegetable shortening, common in cookbooks of this era when butter was dear. Butter works and tastes better; use about 2 tablespoons.
- Thicken to a creamThere is no flour listed, but that is what is meant. Cook 2 tablespoons flour into the fat for a minute or two, then whisk in the strained giblet broth a little at a time, roughly 1 1/2 cups, to get a pourable gravy.
- Cooking liquor is the pointDo not discard the salted water the giblets simmered in. It is the stock, and the whole flavour of the sauce sits in it. Strain it and keep it hot.
- The liver goes in separatelyHeart, gizzard and neck need 45 minutes to an hour of gentle simmering to come tender. The liver needs about 10 minutes and turns grainy and bitter if boiled that long, so add it near the end or poach it apart.
- Salted waterSalt the water lightly, around a teaspoon per quart. The liquid reduces and becomes the sauce base, and final seasoning comes at the end.
- Boil a few minutesOnce the flour is in, a few minutes at a bare simmer is right; it cooks out the raw starch taste. Hard boiling for long will thin a flour-thickened gravy again.
- Neck meatPick the meat off the neck bones before chopping and return the bones to the pot or discard them. The recipe's "chop into coarse pieces" assumes you have done this.
- YieldThe giblets from one chicken give roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sauce, enough for four to six servings with a roast bird or over mashed potatoes.
Giblet sauce is the thrifty half of roasting a bird: the neck, heart, gizzard and liver were sold with the chicken and would have been wasted otherwise, so they went into a small pot of salted water while the bird was in the oven. Recipes of this shape run through English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and the American Thanksgiving giblet gravy is the same idea worked into pan drippings instead of plain broth. The instruction to use "butter substitute" suggests, though a single phrase can hardly settle it, a version from an era when margarine and hydrogenated shortenings were available as household fats alongside butter.