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French Giblet Soup
Chop the liver, wings, gizzard, and heart of a turkey, or 2 chickens fine, and fry them in 1 ounce of butter with 1 onion; add 1 quart of beef stock and 1 pint of hot water, salt, pepper, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 turnip, 2 pieces of celery, and 2 ounces of rice. Cook for 1 hour and serve hot.
A thrifty soup built on the parts left over when a bird is dressed. Everything here translates directly; only the treatment of the liver really needs rethinking.
- Hold the liver backAn hour of simmering turns poultry liver grainy and faintly bitter, and it will cloud the broth. Brown it with the rest, then lift it out and return it, chopped, in the last five minutes.
- The gizzard is the slow partGizzard and the wing joints want the full hour or more to become tender; heart is quicker. If the gizzard still resists at an hour, keep the pot going and add water to compensate.
- Two onions, not oneThe list names an onion twice: one fried with the giblets, one going in with the other vegetables. Whether this is deliberate or a repetition in the printing is impossible to say, but two onions will do the soup no harm. Chop both.
- Weights to volumesOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Two ounces of rice is about 1/3 cup uncooked, long grain; it will thicken the soup noticeably as it stands.
- LiquidA quart of stock plus a pint of hot water gives 6 cups. Use unsalted or low-salt stock and season at the end, since the rice absorbs liquid and concentrates whatever salt is already there.
- Cut the vegetables smallCarrot, turnip and celery in 1/4-inch dice will be soft in the hour given and can stay in the bowl.
- Simmer, do not boilA bare simmer keeps the broth clear and the giblets tender; a rolling boil shreds the rice and clouds everything. Skim the fat off the surface before serving.
- YieldAbout 6 cups, enough for four as a first course. Turkey giblets from one bird, or the giblets from two chickens as stated, are roughly equivalent in quantity.
Giblet soup belongs to the older economy of the kitchen, where a bird arrived whole and nothing that came out of it was thrown away. The gizzard, heart and wing tips gave a strong broth for very little money. The "French" in the title appears to point to the method rather than to any region: the giblets are first browned in butter with onion before the liquid goes in. The rice supplies the body of the soup, and carrot, turnip and celery are a common aromatic combination in cookery of this kind.