Giblet Soup
The giblets from two or three fowls or chickens, any kind of stock, or if there are remains of roast chickens, use those; one large onion, two slices carrot, one of turnip, two quarts of water, two stalks of celery, one quart of stock, two large tablespoonfuls of butter, two tablespoonfuls of flour, salt and pepper to taste. Put the giblets on to boil in the two quarts of water; boil gently until reduced to one quart (it will take about two hours), then take out the giblets. Cut all the hard, tough parts from the gizzard, and put hearts, livers and gizzards together and chop rather coarse; return them to the liquor in which they were boiled, and add the quart of stock. Have the vegetables cut fine, and fry them in butter until they are very tender (about fifteen minutes), but be careful they do not burn; then add the dry flour to them and stir until the flour browns; turn this mixture into the soup, and season with pepper and salt; simmer gently one-half hour and serve with crautons. If the chicken bones are used, put them on to boil with three quarts of water and boil the giblets with them. When you take out the giblets, strain the stock through a sieve and return to the pot; then proceed as before.
A thrifty broth built on the parts that come tucked inside a whole bird. The work is mostly waiting, but two details decide whether it tastes rich or merely brown.
- Sourcing gibletsTwo or three birds' worth is not a great deal: perhaps half a pound to a pound of hearts, gizzards and livers, at the upper end if the necks are included. Supermarket whole chickens rarely include them now; ask a butcher, or buy packaged gizzards and hearts and a few chicken livers separately.
- Hold the livers backThis is the hinge. Two hours of boiling turns livers grainy and bitter and will muddy the whole pot. Simmer the gizzards and hearts for the full time and poach the livers separately for 8 to 10 minutes, then chop them in with the rest.
- The roux is the flavourWhen the flour goes onto the buttered vegetables it must actually brown, not just cook out. Give it a good five minutes over medium heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a walnut shell. Stop short of black.
- Stock quantitiesTwo quarts of water reduce to one quart, plus one quart of stock, so figure on two quarts of finished soup, about six to eight servings. The bone variation starts with three quarts of water instead of two; the recipe does not say why.
- Gizzard trimming"Cut all the hard, tough parts from the gizzard" means the silvery inner membrane and any gristle at the seams. If a gizzard still feels rubbery after two hours, it needs longer rather than more trimming.
- Vegetable measuresOne large onion, two slices of carrot, one of turnip and two celery stalks come to roughly two cups diced, most of it onion. The slices were presumably cut from the whole root, so read them as generous rounds rather than shavings.
- CrautonsThe book's spelling of croutons. Small cubes of stale bread fried in butter or dried in a 350F oven until crisp; add them at the table so they keep their bite.
- Skim and season lateGiblets throw a good deal of grey scum in the first twenty minutes; lift it off or the soup stays cloudy. Salt only after the stock has reduced, since the reduction concentrates whatever was already in it.
Giblet soup belongs to a kitchen where nothing that came out of a bird was thrown away. Before poultry was sold in parts, a roasting fowl typically arrived with its neck, heart, liver and gizzard, and those pieces were too few for a dish of their own but too good to discard, so they went into the stockpot or, as here, into a brown soup thickened with a butter-and-flour roux. The word giblets came into English from Old French gibelet, a word of uncertain origin that appears to have denoted a dish of stewed game; the sense of a fowl's entrails seems to have developed later, in English. That the recipe offers the carcass of a roast chicken as an alternative base tells you what kind of book this is: a household manual written for cooks who accounted for leftovers as a matter of course, and a soup that recycled Sunday's bones into Monday's first course needed no apology.