by Bruce and Elaine Ingram
8 to 12
SERVINGS
Ingredients
- Turkey liver, gizzard, and heart
- Meat from 1 turkey wing
- 2 hard-boiled eggs
- 13 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 4-1/2 cups and 3 tablespoons whole milk, divided
- 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
- Salt and pepper, to taste
Directions
- Chop liver, gizzard, heart, and turkey-wing meat into pencil-eraser-sized pieces. Chop boiled eggs into small pieces. Mix together and set aside in a large bowl.
- Put flour into a soup bowl. Add 2 tablespoons whole milk. Mix to make a flour paste. Then, continue stirring in 1 tablespoon milk, a little at a time, mashing out the lumps in the paste, until you achieve a slurry or thin, milkshake-like consistency.
- In a large saucepan, melt butter. Set pan off heat.
- Add 4 cups whole milk to butter, and stir well.
- Add giblet-egg mix, and then pour in flour-and-milk slurry.
- Add pepper, to taste. Then, take a teaspoon and taste the mix. If it needs some salt, add salt a teaspoon at a time, stir well, and taste until satisfied.
- Start warming gravy mixture on the stove on medium heat, stirring continuously. When gravy starts to bubble, it’ll thicken. If it’s a little thicker than you’d prefer, stir in 1/2 cup milk. Once you’ve reached desired consistency, turn heat to low for no longer than 10 more minutes, stir, and pour into gravy bowl.
“I watched my mother make this gravy every Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Larry told me. “Now, my family, even the grandchildren, insists on giblet gravy for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Be sure to use a whole stick of ‘real’ butter, which really makes the gravy tasty.
Everything But the Gobble
Bruce and Elaine Ingram are the authors of Living the Locavore Lifestyle, a book about hunting, fishing, and gathering food (with recipes). Contact them at BruceIngramOutdoors@Gmail.com.
Originally published as part of “Everything But the Gobble” in the September/October 2023 issue of Grit magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.
