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White Stock
Take five pounds of a shin of veal, a large fowl, four tablespoonfuls of butter, two good-sized onions, four stalks of celery, a small piece of mace, and a stick of cinnamon, eight quarts of water, using salt and pepper. Place the butter in the bottom of the soup-pot, then the meat and fowl cut into small pieces. Cover the pan, and let it cook slowly thirty-five minutes, stirring often; the water must then be added, and when it boils, skim well and place where it will boil gently for six hours. You may then add vegetables and spice and boil about another hour. Strain and cool as quickly as possible; next day take off every particle of fat, turn the jelly into a dish, and with a knife remove all the sediment from the bottom. Put into a stone jar and put in a very cold place. With care it will keep a week in cold weather and two or three days if very warm. stock keeps so much better without vegetables, it is better not to add them until ready to make soup.
As There are two kinds of stock, brown and white, from which almost any kind of soup may be made, by adding vegetables and seasoning to taste. Vegetables should just cook long enough in soup to be well done, as too much cooking is injurious.
This is a foundation stock in the older French manner, meant to set to a jelly and be drawn on through the week. Two things matter more than anything else: keep it below a true boil, and get it cold fast.
- Scale and yieldEight quarts of water plus five pounds of veal shin and a whole fowl needs a 12-quart pot at minimum. After seven hours of gentle reduction expect roughly 4 to 5 quarts of finished stock.
- Shin of vealVeal shin (the shank, sawn across) is the main gelatin source that makes the stock set. A butcher will cut it; osso buco rounds are the same cut. Without it the stock will taste fine but is much less likely to set to a firm jelly.
- A large fowlIn older usage this meant a mature bird, an old laying hen, tough and full of flavor. A supermarket roasting chicken of 4 to 5 lb is the closest substitute, or use a stewing hen if a butcher carries one.
- Mace and cinnamonA small piece of mace is a shard of the dried aril, blade mace, not ground. Both spices go in with the vegetables for the final hour only, as the recipe directs.
- The initial 35 minutesButter, covered pot, frequent stirring: this is a sweat, not a browning. Keep the heat low enough that nothing colors, since any browning is what separates brown stock from white.
- Boil gently means barely movingA rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and clouds the stock. Hold it so the surface is just trembling rather than breaking, and skim well as it first comes up, as the recipe directs.
- Cool it fast, then keep it coldStrain, then set the pot in an ice bath or divide into shallow pans. Ignore the advice about a stone jar in a cold place for a week; that assumes an unheated larder. Refrigerate up to three days, or freeze.
- Season at the endThe salt and pepper listed are best held back almost entirely. Stock that reduces further in a soup or sauce will concentrate whatever salt is already in it.
White stock and brown stock were the two pillars of nineteenth-century household cookery, borrowed from French professional kitchens where they were the fonds from which everything else was built: the white one uncolored, for cream soups, fricassees and vel inthe brown one started with seared meat and used for gravies and clear soups. The insistence on veal shin and a whole fowl reflects a kitchen in which a cook who wanted soup on Thursday made stock on Monday. The note that stock keeps better without vegetables is sound and still repeated by professionals, as onion and celery ferment and sour long before a plain meat jelly does. Setting stock in a stone jar was itself a form of preservation, an approach related to the potted meats and confits that kept a household fed between market days.