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Stewed Chicken Giblets
Wash the giblets from four or five chickens, dry on a cloth, and sprinkle over with flour; fry them in a fryingpan with a little butter. Cut the gizzards in slices, put them in the saucepan with the giblets, add six onions cut up small and slightly browned, and a small bunch of sweet herbs; then pour over sufficient stock to cover, and season with salt and pepper. Place the pan over a moderate fire where it will simmer for about an hour. When the giblets are perfectly done, drain them out, pass the gravy through a strainer and remove all the fat. Rub the onions through a fine sieve and mix with them one tablespoonful of flour, then stir them into the gravy, boil up again, add the giblets, and let it remain until perfectly hot, then serve. Grilled Chickens, Hunter's Style Select small chickens for this. Split them down the backs and beat them with a cutlet bat until flat. Should the birds be large they must be cut into joints. Soak them for an hour in olive oil seasoned with salt and pepper, slices of onion, parsley and lemon juice; sprinkle lightly with breadcrumbs and cook them on a gridiron. If cut up into joints dish them up in the form of a pyramid. Add to some Madeira sauce a sliced onion, fried, and some chopped ham; warm it up, pour over the chickens, and serve.
Two recipes run together here, both built on the assumption that a kitchen has a stockpot going and a set of mother sauces on hand. Neither is difficult, but each depends on a piece of butcher's shorthand that has largely disappeared.
- What "giblets" means hereHeart, gizzard, liver and neck, plus in older usage the wing tips and feet. The giblets of four or five chickens amount to roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of meat, which is a modest serving for four. Supermarket birds often come with only heart, gizzard, liver and neck in a bag; a butcher will sell gizzards and hearts by the pound, which is the easier route.
- Keep the livers out of the long simmerThis is the hinge. Hearts, gizzards and necks want the full hour of gentle cooking to become tender; livers turn grainy and bitter in ten minutes. Fry the livers separately in the butter and fold them in at the very end, with the drained giblets, when the gravy is reheated.
- "Moderate fire" and simmeringA bare simmer, around 185-195F, with the surface barely trembling. A hard boil toughens gizzards rather than tenderising them, and an hour is a minimum for them, not a maximum -- test with a knife point and give them longer if they resist.
- Sweet herbsA bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf, tied or bundled in cheesecloth so it can be pulled before straining. "Sweet" here means fragrant rather than sugary.
- The onions are the thickenerSix onions to a pound of giblets sounds excessive until you see that they are sieved and stirred back in. The purée plus a tablespoon of flour is what gives the dish body; there is no separate roux. A food mill or a blender does the sieving in seconds. Cook the flour into the gravy at a boil for a couple of minutes or it will taste raw and pasty.
- Stock"Sufficient stock to cover" will be somewhere around 3 to 4 cups for this quantity, depending on the width of the pan. Chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since the liquid reduces and is then thickened -- season at the end, not at the start.
- Cutlet bat and gridironA cutlet bat is a flat, heavy meat mallet; the flat side of a cleaver or a small skillet does the same work. A gridiron is a bar grill set over coals. A charcoal or gas grill is the direct equivalent; a broiler works if the chicken is turned, though the oiled crumbs will colour faster under a broiler than they will over fire.
- Doneness on the grilled chickensSpatchcocked small birds run 25-35 minutes over medium heat, turned once, to reach 165F at the thigh. The oil marinade drips and flares, so keep a cooler zone on the grill to move them to.
- Madeira sauceIn Oscar's kitchen this meant a brown sauce (espagnole) finished with Madeira. A modern cook can reduce Madeira with shallot, add well-reduced veal or chicken stock, and thicken lightly; the fried onion and chopped ham stirred in at the end are this version's garnish.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection was written from inside a hotel kitchen where nothing edible was thrown out and every station had stock, espagnole and Madeira sauce standing ready -- which is why a dish of giblets from four or five birds could be presented as a course in its own right. Giblet stews and giblet pies were long a staple of both grand and thrifty cooking in Britain and America, the useful by-product of a kitchen that broke down whole poultry daily; the word giblet comes through Old French gibelet, generally traced to a dish of game. "Hunter's style" is the English rendering of à la chasseur, a name attached in French cooking to preparations with onion, mushroom and wine, and the term appeared on American hotel menus more as a mark of French pedigree than as any fixed formula. The pairing of the two recipes on one page is characteristic of the book: a dish for the offcuts, followed immediately by a dish for the birds themselves.