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Giblets, Stewed

Stewed goose giblets simmered with stock, butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Giblets, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the giblets

  1. Wash the giblets as for Giblet Pie and cover them with stock and water.

  2. Stew the giblets until tender.

  3. Remove the liver, neck, and tendons from the giblets.

  4. Continue to stew the gizzard until it can be easily pierced with a fork.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, heat the butter and fry the flour until brown.

  2. Remove the giblets from the pan.

  3. Strain ½ pint of the stock into the flour and butter mixture.

  4. Stir the mixture until it boils.

  5. Season to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the giblets back to the pan.

  2. Heat thoroughly before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

Goose giblets
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the sauce base.
Flour
Frying it in butter until brown builds color and thickens the sauce as it boils with stock.
Stock
Forms the liquid of the sauce and adds savory flavor.

The step that matters

Frying the flour until brown. Flour fried in butter must cook long enough to lose its raw starchy taste, but stopping at the right brown keeps the sauce from turning bitter or burnt. Adding stock too early or unevenly can leave lumps, so the stock should be strained in and stirred until it boils smoothly.

“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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