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English Giblet Soup
Fry the chopped giblets in butter, as above, add 2 ounces of flour, stir, and when brown, add 1 quart of beef stock, a bayleaf, some parsley, 3 pieces of cooked celery, cut into dice, 2 sliced hard-boiled eggs, a tablespoonful of sherry, and 6 forcemeat balls, made of the meat of the fowl, bread, herbs, and egg, poached in broth. Heat all well and serve hot.
A thickened giblet soup of the late-Victorian English kind, written in the compressed style of a book that assumes you have just read the recipe above it. Two things are left unsaid: the giblets must already be tender, and the roux wants proper browning.
- "As above" means pre-cooked giblets"As above" points back to a preceding recipe we cannot see, most likely for the frying itself; either way the giblets need to be tender before they are fried, since nothing here cooks them. Gizzard, heart and neck are tough muscle and want roughly 1-1.5 hours of gentle simmering. The liver is the exception; it needs only a few minutes and turns grainy if given more.
- The roux is the hingeTwo ounces of flour is about 1/2 cup, and it wants to cook in the butter until it smells nutty and takes a proper brown colour before the stock goes in. Rushed, the soup tastes of raw flour; scorched, it goes bitter and will not thicken.
- QuantitiesOne quart is 4 cups of stock. Against 2 oz of flour that gives a lightly thickened soup rather than a sauce. The six forcemeat balls suggest something in the region of four to six servings as a first course.
- Forcemeat balls"Meat of the fowl, bread, herbs, and egg" is a bread-and-egg bound dumpling. The recipe leaves proportions and herbs open; roughly equal volumes of minced cooked poultry and soft breadcrumbs with one egg to bind works, with parsley or another soft herb. Poach them in broth at a bare tremble until firm, then add at the end so they do not break up.
- Cooked celeryThe recipe assumes celery already cooked, most likely boiled soft as a vegetable and then diced. Blanching diced celery for a few minutes gives much the same effect; raw celery added here stays crunchy and reads as a mistake.
- The sherryThe recipe puts it in with everything else before the final heating; adding it at the very finish instead keeps more of the aroma. A dry amontillado or oloroso suits giblets better than cream sherry.
- Removing the aromaticsThe recipe does not say so, but the bay leaf and any parsley stalks are best put in whole and lifted out before serving. Chopped fresh parsley over the bowl is a natural finish.
- Sourcing gibletsSupermarket birds now carry a token bag, often liver only. A butcher will sell chicken or turkey gizzards and hearts by the pound. The recipe gives no quantity; something in the region of 12 oz of prepared giblets to a quart of stock is a reasonable working amount.
Giblet soup belongs to the older English habit of letting nothing off a bird go to waste: the neck, heart, gizzard and liver removed before roasting were too good to discard and too odd to serve as a course, so they went into a brown, roux-thickened potage that reads as a first cousin to mock turtle. The garnish here — sliced hard-boiled egg, diced celery, forcemeat balls, a spoonful of sherry — is much the same dress given to mock turtle and other rich brown soups of the period, which suggests a dish meant for the table rather than plain kitchen economy. Goose giblets were often reckoned the best, and giblet soup and giblet pie turn up in English cookbooks around Michaelmas and Christmas, when a large bird was being dressed anyway. The terse cross-reference to "as above" is typical of compilations that grouped several treatments of the same material and expected the reader to work through the section in order.