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Economical Gravy for Poultry
287. Wash the feet nicely, and cut them and the neck small; simmer them with a little bread browned, a slice of onion, a bit of parsley and thyme, some pepper and salt, and the liver and gizzard in a quarter of a pint of water, till half-wasted; take out the liver, bruise it, and strain the liquor to it; then thicken it with flour and butter, and add a tea-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and it will be very good.
A giblet gravy built from the parts a modern butcher discards. The whole point is extraction, so keep the liquid at a bare simmer and let it reduce hard rather than boiling it fast.
- A quarter of a pintAbout 5 fl oz (roughly 140-150 ml) by the pint measures in use. Reduced by half, that leaves only about 2.5 fl oz of concentrated liquor, which after thickening makes a small quantity of gravy for a roast bird.
- Feet need preparing"Wash nicely" understates it. Scald the feet in boiling water for half a minute, peel off the yellow outer skin, and clip the nail tips before chopping. They are the source of the gelatine that gives this gravy body.
- The gizzardSplit it and wash out the grit and the tough inner lining before it goes in the pan. Modern packaged giblets are usually already cleaned; feet almost never are.
- Browned breadA crust or a slice toasted dark, used here mainly for colour and a faint bitterness; the recipe thickens separately with flour and butter. Toasted bread was one of the common ways of darkening a pale gravy.
- The liver goes in late, not earlyThe liver -- The recipe simmers the liver from the start with the gizzard, then lifts it out, bruises it, and strains the liquor onto it. If you prefer it not to go chalky, add it only for the last few minutes before mashing and straining onto it.
- Flour and butterEqual weights kneaded cold into a paste (beurre manié) and whisked into the strained liquid in small pieces. Roughly a teaspoon each is plenty for this quantity; simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquor, not the tomato sauce the word now suggests. It is still sold by British specialists; a teaspoon of mushroom ketchup, or failing that a little Worcestershire sauce or soy, supplies the same savoury depth.
- Season at the endReducing by half doubles the salt concentration. Add pepper freely at the start but hold most of the salt back until the gravy is thickened.
Recipes like this one belong to the economy of a household that bought or raised whole birds and threw nothing away: the neck, feet, liver and gizzard were considered the natural raw material of the gravy that would be poured over the roast. Short numbered notes of this kind, ending with the flat assurance that "it will be very good," are characteristic of the English domestic-cookery compilations of the period, whose brief instructions circulated from one book to another with little change. The mushroom ketchup at the finish is of its time: before bottled meat extracts and stock cubes, a spoonful of that dark mushroom liquor was a common way to give a thin gravy the savour of long-cooked meat. Chicken feet largely fell out of British kitchens in the twentieth century as poultry came pre-dressed, though they never left Chinese, Caribbean and West African cooking, where their gelatine is valued for exactly the reason it is used here.