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Giblet Sauce
Put the giblets from any bird into a saucepan with sufficient stock or water to cover them and boil for three hours, adding an onion and a few peppercorns while cooking. Take them out and when they are quite tender, strain the liquor into another pan and chop up the gizzards, livers and other parts into small pieces. Take a little of the thickening left at the bottom of the pan in which a chicken or goose has been braised, and after the fat has been taken off, mix it with the giblet liquor and boil until it is dissolved. Strain the sauce, put in the pieces of giblet, and serve hot.
A working sauce built from the parts that come tucked inside a bird, meant to be made while the roast rests. Two things need adjusting: the boiling time, and the assumption that you have a braising pan full of thickened pan residue waiting.
- Sort the giblets firstNeck, gizzard and heart take long cooking; the liver does not. Simmer the neck, gizzard and heart, and add the liver only for the last 10 minutes, or cook it separately, or it turns grainy and bitters the whole sauce.
- Three hours is for the gizzard aloneA neck and heart are tender in 45-60 minutes. The gizzard is the only part that genuinely wants two to three hours, and even that is a slow simmer, not a boil — a hard boil clouds the liquor and toughens the meat.
- "Sufficient stock or water to cover"For the giblets of one bird, roughly 2 to 3 cups. Reduce the strained liquor to about 1 1/2 cups before thickening if it tastes thin.
- The thickening at the bottom of the panOscar assumes a braised bird has left a floury, gelatinous residue in the roasting or braising pan. If your bird was simply roasted, deglaze the pan with a little of the giblet liquor and thicken with a roux of 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of liquid.
- Skim properlyGoose in particular gives up a great deal of fat. Let the liquor stand a few minutes and lift the fat off the surface, or chill it and take the cap off; the sauce should be glossy, not greasy.
- Strain, then return the meatThe order matters. The sauce is strained smooth first and the chopped giblets go back in afterwards, so the texture reads as a smooth sauce carrying pieces rather than a muddy purée.
- Season at the endNo salt is specified, and reducing pan residue concentrates whatever salt is already there. Taste after the sauce has thickened.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 to 2 cups, enough for a roast chicken, or for a goose or turkey serving six to eight.
Giblet sauce belongs to the older logic of the roast, in which nothing that came with the bird was thrown away: the neck, heart, gizzard and liver were simmered down while the bird cooked and returned to the table as gravy. The word giblets came into English from Old French gibelet, which appears to have denoted a dish made of game, though the word's ultimate origin is uncertain. Oscar Tschirky's book, drawn from the kitchens of the Waldorf around the turn of the twentieth century, presumes a kitchen in which a pan of thickened, fatted braising residue was to hand — hence the casual instruction to take "a little of the thickening left at the bottom of the pan," which assumes an infrastructure the home cook has to substitute for. The recipe also shows the era's habit of long, unhurried simmering.