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French Chef (Wipe veal remove from bone)
Wipe veal, remove from bone, and cut in small pieces; cut beef in pieces, put bone and meat in soup kettle, cover with cold water, and bring quickly to boiling-point; drain, throw away the water. Wash thoroughly bones and meat in cold water; return to kettle, add vegetables, seasonings, and three quarts boiling water. Boil three or four hours; the stock should be reduced one half.
This is a French-style white stock: the meat and bones are blanched first, the water discarded, and only then is the real cooking liquid added. That first step is the whole point of the method and is what separates it from an ordinary brown stock.
- Why you throw the water awayThe quick boil drives scum and coagulated blood out of the bones in a few minutes. Draining it and washing the bones in cold water is what gives the finished stock its clarity, so do not be tempted to skip ahead and skim instead.
- "Boil" means a bare simmer"Boil" here is best read as a steady simmer rather than a hard rolling boil, which emulsifies fat into the liquid and turns a clear stock cloudy, undoing the blanching. The recipe itself gives no temperature.
- Three or four hours is right for vealVeal bones are rich in collagen and give body rather than strong flavour. Three to four hours at a simmer is the sweet spot; much longer and the stock takes on a dulled, slightly glue-like taste.
- Reduced one halfThree quarts of water should come down to roughly a quart and a half. Do not add water back partway through, or the reduction will not happen.
- Vegetables and seasoningsThe recipe does not say which. A usual set would be onion, carrot, a stalk or two of celery, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf and a sprig of parsley or thyme. Salt lightly at the start and correct at the end, since the liquid loses half its volume.
- Cut small, and cut the meat off the boneThe direction to remove the veal from the bone and cut it small is not fussiness. More cut surface means faster extraction, and the bone goes in whole to give gelatin over the long simmer.
- Strain and chillStrain through a fine sieve or damp cloth without pressing on the solids, then chill. The fat sets in a firm cap you can lift off in one piece, and the stock beneath should be lightly jellied if the proportion of bone was right.
Stock made this way -- veal and beef blanched, refreshed in cold water, then simmered with aromatics -- corresponds to the white stock, or fond blanc, of the French professional kitchen, and its appearance in an American domestic cookbook under a heading naming a French chef reflects how far French professional practice had reached English-language household books. The blanching step belongs to a tradition that valued a limpid, pale broth above a strongly flavoured one: veal was chosen precisely because it is mild, contributing gelatin and mouthfeel rather than taste, so that the finished stock could be built into anything from a clear consomm":":