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Goose's Giblets Stewed with Apples
After cleaning the giblets thoroughly, cut them up and put them in a stewpan with an onion stuck with three cloves, a small bunch of parsley and a little water; dust in salt and pepper and stew them gently; peel some apples, cut them in quarters and core; put them in a stewpan with a small quantity of water, a slice of lemon peel, brown sugar to taste, and cook them gently until soft, but without breaking; put one ounce of butter in a saucepan with a tablespoonful of flour, and stir it over the fire until brown; then mix in a small quantity of the cooking liquor of the giblets; strain the syrup off the apples, mix it in with the sauce and stir over the fire until thick and smooth. Take a tablespoonful of currants, wash them thoroughly and put them in boiling water until plump. Remove the onion and parsley from the giblets, pour the sauce in with them and color darkly with caramel. After draining them, mix the currants, and the quarters of apples in with the giblets and make all hot together.
A brown fricassee of goose giblets sweetened with apple and currants — plain 19th-century economy cooking dressed up for a hotel kitchen. The one thing the text glosses over is that the giblets are not all one thing and must not go into the pot together.
- Sort the giblets firstGizzard and heart are working muscle and want 1 to 1½ hours of bare simmering; the neck can go in with them. The liver needs five minutes at most and turns bitter and grainy if stewed, so poach it separately at the end or leave it out and save it for something else.
- "Stew them gently" means a bare simmerNo time is given. Hold the liquid at the point where a bubble breaks every second or two; a rolling boil makes gizzard rubbery and clouds the cooking liquor you need for the sauce. Add water as it reduces so the pieces stay covered.
- Currants are dried, not freshThese are dried Zante currants — small raisins — not red or black currants off a bush. Plumping them in boiling water for five minutes is all they need.
- Caramel colouringPeriod kitchens kept a bottle of "browning": sugar cooked to near-black and let down with water. A teaspoon of dark soy or a commercial gravy browning does the same job, or simply take the roux further to a proper dark brown and skip the colouring.
- Choice of appleThe instruction to cook them soft "without breaking" works best with a firm variety — Braeburn, Granny Smith. A McIntosh will collapse into sauce in the poaching liquor.
- The brown rouxOne ounce of butter to a tablespoon of flour is a butter-heavy, loose roux; cook it over moderate heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell, then add the giblet liquor a little at a time off the heat to keep it smooth. Browned flour thickens less than pale flour, so expect a light-bodied sauce.
- Season at the endThe apple syrup carries brown sugar and the liquor has reduced, so hold back on salt until sauce, giblets and fruit are combined. A spoonful of cider vinegar at the finish keeps the whole thing from reading as dessert.
- YieldThe giblets from one goose, stretched with apples, serve two as a main course or four as a first course. Buying giblets separately from a poulterer or a frozen bag from the supermarket is the practical route today.
Giblet stews belong to the thrift end of the goose, which was a Michaelmas and Christmas bird in Britain and northern Europe and left a cook with a neck, gizzard, heart, liver and wing tips that nobody would roast. Pairing them with apple is the same logic that puts apple sauce beside the roast itself: goose is fatty and the fruit's acid cuts it, and in German and Alsatian cooking the combination of goose offal, apples and dried fruit is standing practice — G\version of the dish, Gänseklein, is the familiar one. Oscar Tschirky's book, compiled at the Waldorf around the turn of the twentieth century, ran to some nine hundred pages and made room for a great many of these modest household dishes alongside the hotel's showpieces, which tells you something about the kind of cooking a big American kitchen of the 1890s still expected its staff to know. The brown roux, the onion stuck with cloves, the bunch of parsley and the bottle of caramel colouring are the standard furniture of that kitchen, applied here to parts that cost almost nothing.