Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Giblets

A stew of chicken giblets with onions, water, flour, ketchup, and seasonings, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stewed Giblets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the gizzard, neck, and liver into pieces.

  2. Melt the butter in a stew pan and fry the sliced onions until pale brown.

Stew

  1. Add the giblets and water; bring to a boil and skim thoroughly.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, then stew gently for 1.5 hours, keeping the pan covered.

  3. Blend the flour and ketchup, add to the stew, and boil for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a dish with toasted bread pieces.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the stew liquid as it boils, giving it body.
Butter
Fat for frying the onions, adding richness and browning them.
Onions
Soften and brown in butter, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the stew.
Giblets
Main meat, which becomes tender through gentle stewing.

The step that matters

Skim thoroughly after bringing to a boil. Foam and scum rise to the surface as the giblets heat. Removing them keeps the stew liquid clear and prevents a bitter, greasy taste in the finished dish.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, ketchup, pepper. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes