Skip to main content
Main

Giblet Soup

A hearty soup made from chicken or turkey giblets, vegetables, butter, flour, and lemon, served over egg halves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,053 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Giblet Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a stewpan, heat butter the size of an egg.

  2. Add the sliced onion, then the minced carrot and turnip; cook until tender and lightly browned.

  3. Stir in the giblets and 1 tablespoon of flour, stirring often to prevent burning.

  4. Cut up the giblets and add them to a soup kettle with the vegetables.

Simmer the soup

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of pepper, and 3 quarts of water or stock.

  2. Let the mixture simmer slowly for at least 3 hours, then strain it.

Finish and serve

  1. Mash the livers with 1 tablespoon of melted butter and 1 tablespoon of browned flour.

  2. Squeeze the juice of a small lemon into the liver mixture and add it to the soup.

  3. In a tureen, place the yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs cut into halves and pour the soup over them.

  4. Serve hot.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,585 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
Provide the rich meat and broth flavour that forms the body of the soup.
Onion, carrot and turnip
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock as they soften and brown.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly as it cooks with the fat and vegetables.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavour of the soup.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add creamy yolk texture and richness when the soup is poured over them.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables and stirring in the flour. Cooking the onion, carrot and turnip until lightly browned builds savoury flavour, while stirring often keeps the flour from scorching and tasting bitter.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Leekbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  3. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, carrot, turnip, parsley, butter, flour, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

More giblet soup recipes

Chicken 12Duck 7Clear 4Irish 3Lamb 3Turkey 3 See all 146 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes