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Giblet Soup

A clear soup made from chicken giblets, bones, and broth, finished with sautéed onion and a roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Giblet Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Break up the skeleton of the roast chicken and place bones, stuffing, and giblets in a soup pot with water.

  2. Boil for one hour.

  3. Remove the giblets.

  4. Continue boiling the remaining ingredients for another hour.

  5. Strain the broth.

  6. Cool the broth.

  7. Skim the broth.

Make the roux and finish

  1. In a separate pan, fry the sliced onion in butter.

  2. Remove the onion.

  3. Stir in the browned flour. Cook for five minutes.

  4. Thin the mixture with a few spoonfuls of the broth.

  5. Strain the mixture into the soup pot.

  6. Simmer the soup until ready to 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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and flavor when frying the onion, carrying aroma into the soup.
Browned flour
Thickens the broth and adds a toasted, nutty flavor.
Onion
Contributes sweetness and aromatic flavor as it fries in butter.
Giblets
Give the broth its deep, meaty chicken flavor during boiling.

The step that matters

Thin the mixture with broth before straining it into the pot. Adding flour mixture directly to the hot soup can form lumps, because flour clumps when it meets liquid without being dispersed first. Thinning with a little warm broth first lets the starch disperse evenly, giving a smooth, lump-free thickened soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour. 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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