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October 21
Menu: Giblet Soup; Spiced Shoulder of Mutton; Brussels Sprouts Mashed Potatoes; Prune Mold; Coffee Giblet Soup-Scald and cut up 1 set of giblets-these include the neck, gizzard, liver, and heart of any fowl, put them into a pan with 1 quart stock or water, 1 whole onion stuck with cloves, and the grated rind of 1/2 a lemon. Simmer for 3 hours and strain. Peel and slice 2 onions and fry them in 3 tablespoons melted Crisco when brown, stir in 1 tablespoon flour and fry it brown, add the stock and stir till boiling, put back the giblets, season with salt and pepper, 1 grated carrot and simmer for 30 minutes.
A thrifty brown giblet soup from the Crisco promotional cookbook, built on the parts of the bird most cooks now discard. The method is sound; only a few of its assumptions need translating.
- What a "set of giblets" isNeck, gizzard, heart and liver from one bird — roughly 6 to 8 oz from a chicken, considerably more from a turkey. Supermarket birds often come with these tucked inside; if not, ask a butcher, or buy chicken hearts and gizzards separately and add a neck.
- "Scald and cut up"Pour boiling water over the giblets, drain, then trim. The gizzard needs splitting and the tough inner lining peeled away, and any green-stained patch on the liver must be cut off — bile makes the whole pot bitter.
- Hold the liver backThree hours of simmering turns liver grainy and metallic. Simmer neck, gizzard and heart for the long stock; add the diced liver only in the final 30-minute stage with the carrot.
- CriscoAny neutral fat works: vegetable shortening, oil, or 3 tablespoons of butter if you want more flavour. The book specifies Crisco because the book exists to sell it.
- The roux is the pointOne tablespoon of flour in three tablespoons of fat gives a loose brown roux. Cook it until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a walnut shell — a pale roux leaves the soup thin and floury. Add the hot stock gradually to keep it smooth.
- Onion stuck with clovesThe recipe gives no number; a few whole cloves pressed into a peeled onion is the usual reading. The onion is fished out with the strainer, so the broth is flavoured without leaving cloves to bite into.
- Liquid and reductionA quart simmered three hours will lose a good deal to evaporation. Keep the lid ajar and top up with water if it drops much below a pint and a half, or the finished soup will be more gravy than soup.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest of half a lemon; the white pith beneath is bitter and three hours will draw it out.
- YieldThe original gives none. Expect three to four modest bowls — this was a first course, not a main.
Procter & Gamble published cookbooks for a product launched in 1911: hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a clean, odourless, all-purpose replacement for lard and butter. One of them, A Calendar of Dinners, assigned a full menu to every day of the year, which is why this soup carries a date rather than a chapter heading. Giblet soup itself long predates Crisco hereery through the nineteenth century, a way of turning the neck, gizzard, heart and liver of a roasting bird into a first course rather than throwing them out. The browned onion and brown roux mark it as the "brown" style of giblet soup, distinguished in older books from a paler version thickened with cream or egg. Its appearance here is telling: the recipe is entirely traditional, and the shortening has simply been slotted into the place a spoonful of dripping or butter would have occupied, which was precisely the argument the company wanted to make.