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Giblets, Francaise
Cut into half-inch pieces the neck, wings, gizzard and heart left over from Saturday night, and place in a saucepan with one finely chopped onion and one ounce butter and cook on the fire ten minutes, or until a light brown, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add three leeks cut into small squares, and one stalk well cleaned celery, cut in same way. Moisten with two pints white broth and three pints of water. Tie together three branches parsley, sprig thyme, sprig marjoram and one bay leaf, and add to the soup. Season with one and a half teaspoons salt and half teaspoon pepper, then let slowly boil thirty minutes. Add two ounces raw rice and boil forty minutes more. Remove the bunch of herbs, skim fat from the surface of broth. Pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A thrifty giblet soup built on the parts of a bird nobody roasts. The instructions are sound; the two things that need attention are the rice timing and what counts as "white broth."
- The rice is the hingeForty minutes will reduce modern long-grain rice to threads and cloud the broth. Add it about 18-20 minutes before serving and judge by grain, not clock.
- What the giblets areNeck, wings, gizzard and heart, and pointedly not the liver, which turns the broth bitter and muddy. If your bird came with a liver, fry it separately. Gizzard is the tough one; halve it and trim the silver lining before cutting into half-inch pieces.
- "Left over from Saturday night"The phrase implies the bird was dealt with the night before and the giblets kept back, though the recipe says no more than that. Modern supermarket birds usually carry a giblet packet, and butchers sell chicken necks and wings cheaply if you want to make this deliberately rather than by accident.
- White brothAn unbrowned, lightly seasoned stock from veal or poultry bones, not a rich brown stock. Unsalted chicken stock is the nearest thing on a shelf; if you use a salted one, hold back on the teaspoon and a half of salt until the end.
- Volume and yieldTwo pints broth plus three pints water is five pints, roughly 2.4 litres before reduction. That serves six to eight as a first course, in a pot of at least four quarts.
- "Slowly boil"Read this as a bare simmer. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat back into the liquid and makes skimming at the end pointless.
- The bouquetParsley, thyme, marjoram and bay tied with string, or in a scrap of muslin if your herbs are dried. Removing it before serving matters, as bay left in a hot tureen keeps giving.
- Cut sizes"Small squares" for leeks and celery means a small dice, around a quarter inch. Wash the leeks well after cutting; grit is hard to retrieve once it is in the pot.
Giblet soups run right through nineteenth-century household cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, and they exist for the same reason as pot-liquor and bone broth: the bird was expensive and none of it was thrown away. The francaise label here is probably best read as signalling French method rather than French origin, meaning the fond of onion and butter sweated to light brown, the leek-and-celery aromatics, and the tied bouquet of parsley, thyme, marjoram and bay lifted out before service. The International Cook Book was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and this is the kind of entry that shows a professional chef writing for a domestic kitchen: restaurant technique applied to the trimmings, with the day of the week built into the instructions.