Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Giblets

A savory stew of boiled chicken giblets simmered with onion, cloves, mace, pepper, allspice, and a lemon‑mushroom ketchup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Stewed Giblets

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer the giblets

  1. Clean the giblets and place them in a saucepan, covering them with cold water.

  2. Bring the liquid to a boil, skimming off any scum that forms.

  3. Add the onion, cloves, mace, black pepper, allspice, and salt.

  4. Cover and simmer gently for 1.5 to 2.5 hours until tender.

  5. Remove the pinions when done.

  6. Return the pinions to the pot when the gizzards are ready.

  7. Take out the giblets.

Make the sauce

  1. Thicken the sauce with flour and butter.

  2. Boil the sauce for 30 minutes until it is just enough to serve with the giblets.

  3. Strain the sauce into a clean saucepan.

  4. Cut the giblets into bite-sized pieces and add them to the sauce along with lemon juice and mushroom ketchup.

Serve

  1. Serve in a soup dish with sippets of bread at the bottom.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Giblets
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce as it gelatinises with heat.
Butter
Enriches the thickened sauce with fat, adding richness and smooth texture.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savoury, umami depth to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently with the lid on. A gentle simmer lets connective tissue in the giblets break down slowly into tenderness, while a hard boil toughens muscle fibres and makes them stringy. Skimming off scum keeps the broth clear.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, pepper, allspice, flour, butter, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, pepper, allspice, flour, butter, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes