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Ducks' Giblet Soup
Take three or four lots of duck's giblets, scald, clean, cut them into pieces, and put in a stewpan; add three quarts of water, a pound and a half of gravy beef, two onions, a bunch of sweet herbs, and the rind of half a lemon, and simmer until the gizzards are soft. Strain the broth, add some slices of onion fried brown in butter, mix in sufficient flour to thicken the soup, and stir over the fire a few minutes until it boils. Strain, skim and pour the soup into 2 tureen, put back the piece of lemon peel, and add two teaspoonfuls of catsup and two wineglassfuls of Madeira wine, and serve with toasted bread cut into dice.
A long-simmered giblet broth in the English style, finished with browned onion, a flour thickening and Madeira. The work is front-loaded: everything depends on simmering the gizzards until genuinely tender before you touch the thickening.
- "Lots" of gibletsA lot is the giblet set from one bird: neck, heart, gizzard and liver. Three or four sets is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb. Hold the livers back and add them for the last 15 minutes, or they turn grainy and muddy the broth.
- Gizzards are the clockGizzard is dense working muscle and wants something like 1 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer. Nothing else in the pot sets the timing, and thickening a broth whose gizzards are still tough cannot be undone.
- Gravy beefThis is shin or leg meat, cut for its gelatine rather than tenderness. Beef shin or chuck works; it is there for body, not for serving.
- Scald and cleanGizzards must be split and the tough inner lining peeled away, and necks rinsed of any blood. Scalding loosens the membrane.
- ThickeningFor three quarts reduced by simmering, figure 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour worked into the fried onion and butter, then let it boil a few minutes to lose the raw taste.
- WineglassfulsA wineglass in this period is about 2 fluid ounces, so two glasses is roughly 1/2 cup of Madeira. Add it off the heat so the flavour is not driven off.
- CatsupAt this date catsup could still mean mushroom or walnut catsup, a thin dark savoury condiment, rather than sweet tomato ketchup, though bottled tomato ketchup was widely sold by then. Mushroom catsup is probably closer to the intention here.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Serve the meat picked from the necks and the sliced gizzard in the bowls if you like, though the recipe as written strains toward a clear thickened soup.
Giblet soup is an English tavern and household dish that traveled into American hotel kitchens largely unchanged; versions of nearly this wording appear through the nineteenth century in books like Mrs. Rundell's and Eliza Acton's. Its logic is thrift dressed up: the necks, hearts and gizzards left over from roasting ducks were too good to discard, and beef shin, Madeira and browned onion turned them into something a dining room could charge for. Oscar Tschirky kept it in his 1896 book.