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Meat and Vegetable Stock
Having put the necessary quantity of meat, bones, and trimmings, with a proper proportion of water, into the stewpan, chop the vegetables, allowing to each quart of water a lettuce, a head of celery, two small onions, each stuck with a clove, a leek, a turnip, a carrot, a small bunch of savoury herbs, some parsley, and, unless the soup is to be white, a dessert-spoonful of brown sugar, and half an ounce of salt. Stew from five to six hours; pulp the vegetables, and strain through a sieve for use. A pint of water is enough for a pound of meat.
This is a general-purpose brown or white stock rather than a fixed recipe, and it works on ratios: one pint of water to one pound of meat and bone, and one set of vegetables to each quart of water. A few of its instructions run against current stock practice.
- The ratio, in metric and cupsA pint of water to a pound of meat is roughly 570 ml to 450 g; an imperial pint is about 2.4 US cups. For 4 quarts of water you need about 8 lb of meat, bones and trimmings, which is a substantial pot.
- StewpanA stewpan is generally a deep, heavy, lidded saucepan rather than a shallow saute pan. Any tall stockpot serves; depth matters because it limits evaporation over five hours.
- Keep it below a boilThe book gives no temperature, but 'stew' here is best read as a bare tremble, with the surface barely moving rather than boiling. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives fine particles into suspension, and no amount of straining afterwards will clear the result.
- Add the vegetables lateFive to six hours reduces lettuce, leek and celery to nothing useful, and turnip and carrot turn sweet then flat. Modern kitchens give the bones the long haul and add the vegetables for the final hour.
- Pulping muddies the stockPushing the cooked vegetables through the sieve pushes starch and fibre through with them. If you want a clear consommé base, strain without pressing; pulp only if the stock is destined for a thick purée soup.
- The salt is highHalf an ounce to the quart is about 14 g in a little over a litre, roughly 1.25 percent — too salty for a stock you intend to reduce into a sauce or a glaze. Season lightly, or not at all, if the stock will be concentrated later.
- The brown sugarA dessertspoonful is about two teaspoons, and it is there for colour rather than sweetness. It will not caramelise in a pan of water, though; browning the meat and bones first, or roasting them, gives deeper colour and more flavour for the same purpose.
- Onion stuck with a cloveOne whole clove pressed into each peeled onion, as the recipe specifies, so they can be fished out whole. Cloves are assertive after five hours.
- Yield and keepingExpect to lose a quarter to a third of the water to evaporation. Chill the strained stock fast, lift the set fat off the top, and use within three or four days refrigerated, or freeze it.
Stock of this kind is the foundation of the nineteenth-century English kitchen's soup and sauce work, and Cassell's treats it accordingly: it is not a dish but a material, expected to be on hand before anything else is attempted. The distinction the recipe draws between white and brown — sugar and colour for one, omitted for the other — arguably echoes the French classification that English cookery books absorbed through the century, and the boiled lettuce among the aromatics is a genuinely Victorian touch that has almost entirely dropped out of modern practice. Note too the economy on display: meat, bones and trimmings together, nothing wasted, and the spent vegetables pushed through a sieve rather than thrown away. Long, slow, unattended simmering was assumed rather than argued for.