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Giblet Soup

A hearty soup made with turkey or chicken giblets, vegetables, rice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Giblet Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dice the giblets, neck, and first joints of wings and legs.

Make the soup

  1. In a soup kettle, brown the meat and diced vegetables with butter for 15 minutes.

  2. Add water, tomato sauce, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

  3. Add the bunch of soup herbs and simmer for 1 hour.

  4. Stir in the raw rice and simmer for another hour.

  5. Remove the herbs and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Giblets, neck, and wing and leg joints
Provide the meat and rich, savoury flavour that forms the base of the broth.
Raw rice
Thickens the soup as its starch softens during the final simmer.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and savoury depth to the broth.
Butter
Carries flavour and helps brown the meat and vegetables at the start.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma as it browns with the meat and vegetables.

The step that matters

Browning the meat and vegetables in butter. Browning creates Maillard flavour compounds that give the broth depth. Pale, steamed vegetables produce a flatter, blander soup, so the pot should be hot enough to colour them.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, carrot, turnip, onion, leek, celery, butter):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, carrot, turnip, onion, leek, celery, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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