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Giblet Gravy or Sauce
Place the giblets (the liver, heart and gizzard) and the neck in a saucepan, and cover them with cold water. Simmer slowly, and when tender remove the neck and chop the giblets fine, saving the water in which they were cooked. When the turkey is lifted from the pan, pour off all but three small tablespoons of the oil, place the pan on the top of the stove, and when the gravy boils stir in two tablespoons of flour. Cook two minutes and add the water in which the giblets were cooked, pouring it in gradually so as not to thin the gravy too much. If the gravy seems too thick, add also a little hot water. Put in lastly the chopped giblets, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve in a gravy dish.
A straightforward pan gravy built on the roasting drippings, written for a cook who already has a turkey coming out of the oven. Two things in it need attention: the liver, and what "the oil" means.
- Cook the liver separatelyGizzard and neck want 1 to 1½ hours of gentle simmering to become tender; the liver is done in 10 to 15 minutes and turns chalky and bitter beyond that. Add it near the end, or poach it on its own and chop it in with the rest.
- "The oil" is the drippingsThe book means the rendered fat and juices in the roasting pan, not cooking oil. Three tablespoons of fat to two tablespoons of flour is a slightly loose roux, which is what you want for a pourable gravy.
- Pour off, then keep the brown bitsTip off the excess fat but leave every scrap of caramelised fond stuck to the pan. That, and not the flour, is where the flavour comes from. Scrape as you stir.
- Cook the flour longer than two minutesTwo minutes over a moderate burner barely cooks out the raw starch. Give it three or four, stirring, until it smells faintly nutty, before any liquid goes in.
- Liquid quantityThe recipe leaves this to judgement, saying only to cover the giblets with cold water. Two tablespoons of flour will thicken somewhere around one to one and a half cups of giblet broth to a pourable gravy, so expect to have broth left over.
- Strain the brothThe giblet water will carry sediment and stray bits of neck bone. Strain it before it goes into the pan, and add it warm rather than cold so the gravy does not seize.
- Salt last, as writtenDrippings from a brined or heavily seasoned bird can be salty enough on their own. Taste after the giblets are in.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; on the quantities above, something in the region of a cup and a half of gravy, depending how much broth you let down with.
Giblet gravy is the thrifty companion piece to any roast bird: the neck, heart, gizzard and liver are removed before roasting and would otherwise be wasted, so they go into a pot of water that becomes the stock for the gravy. The word giblet comes into English as Middle English gibelet, by way of Old French, though its ulterior origin is recorded as uncertain; the sense 'edible entrails of a fowl' is attested from the fifteenth century. Its place in the sauce chapter of a turn-of-the-century American household manual like Butterick's is telling o how to get a second dish out of the parts you paid for was doing its job. The method here is the classic pan-gravy sequence still taught today: pour off surplus fat, cook flour in what remains, then let down with stock.