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Brown Soup Stock
6 lbs. shin of beef 3 quarts cold water 1/2 teaspoon peppercorns 6 cloves 1/2 bay leaf 3 sprigs thyme 1 sprig marjoram 2 sprigs parsley Carrot, Turnip, Onion, Celery (1/2 cup each, cut in dice) 1 tablespoon salt Wipe beef, and cut the lean meat in inch cubes. Brown one-third of meat in hot frying-pan in marrow from a marrow-bone. Put remaining two-thirds with bone and fat in soup kettle, add water, and let stand for thirty minutes. Place on back of range, add browned meat, and heat gradually to boiling-point. As scum rises it should be removed. Cover, and cook slowly six hours, keeping below boiling-point during cooking. Add vegetables and seasonings, cook one and one-half hours, strain, and cool as quickly as possible.
A classic long-simmered brown stock, built on the old rule that stock should never actually boil. Everything else here is timing and patience.
- Never let it boilThe instruction to keep it "below boiling-point" for the whole six hours is the hinge of the recipe. A bare shiver at around 180-195F keeps the liquid clear; a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds it permanently.
- "Back of the range"On a coal range the back was the cool zone. On a modern burner use the lowest setting, or move the covered pot to a 200-250F oven, which holds a sub-simmer with no attention.
- Shin of beefBeef shin, or foreshank, sold sawn crosswise. Ask the butcher to split the bone so the marrow is accessible, since the recipe uses that marrow as the browning fat. Any neutral fat or oil will do if no marrow is available.
- Why only a third is brownedBrowning develops color and flavor; the unbrowned meat, started in cold water, gives up more soluble protein and gelatin. The thirty-minute cold soak before heating does the same work.
- Vegetables go in lateAdding carrot, turnip, onion and celery for the last hour and a half is deliberate. Held for the full six hours they lose most of their aroma, and the reasoning of the period was that long cooking dulls their flavour.
- Cool it fast"Cool as quickly as possible" is a food-safety instruction, not a nicety. Set the strained stock in a sink of ice water and stir, then refrigerate; the fat cap lifts off cleanly once cold.
- YieldSix hours plus a further hour and a half comes to roughly seven and a half hours of cooking. The recipe gives no finished yield, and the pot is covered and kept below a boil, so losses are modest. The tablespoon of salt is a base seasoning for a stock you will season again later.
Brown stock and white stock were the two pillars of the household kitchen in the decades when American cookery schools were codifying French method for domestic cooks, and books of this period commonly open the soup chapter with them. Browning is part of the distinction, though white stock in these books is usually built on veal knuckle or fowl rather than the same beef shin; searing part of the meat and its marrow gives the darker, meatier base for consomme, brown sauces and gravies. Shin was the cut of choice because it is cheap, heavily worked, and thick with collagen and marrow bone, which is what gives a cooled stock its jelly. The long, low, never-boiling simmer suited the banked coal range, which held a gentle background heat with little tending, and the insistence on rapid cooling reflects a period when cookbooks warned that a warm stockpot left standing would sour.