Home › The Principles of Cookery › Stock, Rich and Strong
Stock, Rich and Strong
Take two pounds of the shin of beef and two pounds of knuckle of veal; cut the meat into small pieces, and break up the bones. Butter a saucepan, line it with slices of lean ham or bacon, lay upon these the beef and veal; add the bones and any trimmings of meat or poultry that may be at hand. An old hen or the carcase of a rabbit or roasted chicken will be valuable additions. Pour in a pint of water, cover the saucepan, and boil it quickly, stirring it frequently till it is reduced to glaze. Let this brown gently or not, as required, pour in two quarts of cold water, and when this boils add a large onion stuck with two cloves, a few sticks of celery, a large carrot, a young turnip, half a blade of mace, a bunch of savoury herbs, a few peppercorns, and a little salt. Remove the scum carefully as it rises, and add a spoonful of cold water occasionally to assist it in doing so; simmer the stock gently for four hours; strain it into an earthenware pan, and, when it is quite cold, carefully remove the fat from the top. Time to simmer the stock, three to four hours.
This is a classic brown stock built on the sear-and-deglaze principle: the meat juices are first reduced to a sticky glaze in the pan, then dissolved into the water. Everything that gives the stock its colour and depth happens in that first stage.
- The hinge: reducing to glazeThe pint of water is boiled off until the meat juices caramelise into a brown film on the pan bottom. Watch it closely at the end and stir — the difference between a rich glaze and a burnt one is a minute or two, and scorched glaze makes the whole pot bitter.
- Simmer, never boil, after thatOnce the two quarts go in, keep the surface barely trembling rather than boiling. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and clouds the stock; clearing it afterwards means clarifying with egg white, so it is easier not to let it happen.
- Knuckle of vealAsk a butcher for veal knuckle or veal marrow bones, sawn across. If unavailable, beef knuckle or oxtail gives similar gelatine, though less delicate. The shin of beef is the flavour and the veal is the body — do not drop one for double the other.
- An old henA stewing fowl or boiling hen, an older laying bird with far more flavour than a young broiler. Butchers and Asian and Caribbean markets still stock them; a supermarket chicken carcass or a pack of wings is the everyday substitute.
- MaceHalf a blade is a small quantity, an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of ground mace at most, but blade mace keeps its perfume better in a long simmer and strains out cleanly. Mace is the aril that covers the nutmeg seed, so nutmeg is a close relation but sharper; use a bare pinch if substituting.
- Salt lightly, or not at allThe "little salt" matters because this stock is a base. Reduce it later for a sauce and any salt added now concentrates along with it. Modern practice tends to leave stock unsalted and season the finished dish.
- The cold water trickAdding a spoonful of cold water checks the boil, which the recipe says assists the scum in rising so it can be lifted off. Skim with a ladle rather than a spoon and you lose less liquid.
- Cooling and the earthenware panThe instruction to cool it completely before lifting the fat cap is sound — the fat sets into a disc you can lift off whole. Cool it fast rather than leaving a deep pot on the counter overnight: strain into a wide shallow container, then refrigerate once it stops steaming.
- Yield and keepingExpect appreciably less than the two quarts you started with, once four hours' simmering and straining are accounted for. It keeps three or four days refrigerated under its fat cap, or freezes for several months; reduced further to a firm glaze it keeps considerably longer in the cold.
Stock is where nineteenth-century cookery books begin, because everything else in the sauce chapter depends on it. The method here — lining the pan with ham, drawing out the juices, reducing them to a glaze and then dissolving that glaze in fresh water — is the English domestic version of the French *fonds brun*, the technique associated with Carême and later with Escoffier. The frugality is as instructive as the method: an old hen past laying, a rabbit carcass, the bones from Sunday's roast chicken and the scraps of trimming all go in, so that a household stockpot converted leftovers into the foundation of the week's soups and sauces. The direction to brown the glaze "or not, as required" is the fork in the road between brown stock for gravies and espagnole and a pale stock for white sauces and clear soups.