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One Onion (Half a head of Celery)
Half a head of Celery.
One teaspoonful of Salt.
Four quarts of Water.
Cut the meat off the shin of beef into small pieces. Break the bones and remove the marrow.
Put the meat, bones, and water into a stock-pot, add the salt, and remove the scum as it rises.
When the stock is thoroughly skimmed and boiling, put in the vegetables, all well washed and cut up in large pieces. Avoid the use of spices and herbs in making stocks, and do not use much salt: these seasonings can be added later when you finish the soups made from this stock. Let the stock boil slowly for at least five hours; then strain it through a hair-sieve into a basin, and let B it get cold. White stock is made in this way, only use knuckle of veal instead of beef, and bones of poultry, all white meat.
This is the brown stock that underpins the whole soup chapter, printed with its ingredient list mangled — the title and opening lines are the tail end of a list whose head, the shin of beef itself, has been lost in setting. A few notes will get it to work.
- The missing quantityNo weight of shin is given anywhere on the page. For four quarts of water, reckon on 4 to 5 lb of shin, bone included; less than that gives coloured water rather than stock. The stray capital B before "get cold" is almost certainly a printer's mark -- a signature letter or catchword -- rather than an instruction.
- Shin of beefSold as beef shank or soup bones. Ask for it cut across into rounds so the bones are already open. The recipe says to break the bones and remove the marrow but does not say why; marrow fat will cloud a stock, though the recipe itself makes no such claim.
- The hinge: barely a simmer"Boil slowly" means what we would call a bare simmer, an occasional lazy bubble at around 185-195F. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and albumen into the liquid and no amount of straining afterwards will bring it back clear.
- Skim before the vegetables go inThe order matters. Once celery, onion and the rest are floating, the grey scum catches among them and cannot be lifted off cleanly. Get the surface clean first, then add vegetables.
- Salt and seasoningOne teaspoon in four quarts is deliberately mean. Stock reduces, and the finished soups are seasoned at the end; the instruction to keep spices and herbs out is sound practice and still taught.
- Hair-sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair. A fine-mesh strainer lined with damp muslin does the same work. Ladle rather than pour, and leave the last murky inch in the pot.
- Cooling and fat"Let it get cold" is how the fat is removed — it sets in a disc you lift off whole. Cool it fast in a shallow container and refrigerate; four quarts left standing warm overnight is the one genuine risk here.
- YieldFive hours of slow simmering will reduce the four quarts appreciably, though how far depends on the pot and whether it is covered. The recipe gives no yield figure.
- White stockKnuckle of veal is sold as veal shank; poultry bones alone, or veal plus chicken carcasses, work as well. Blanch the bones briefly and discard that first water if you want the stock genuinely pale.
Stock built on shin of beef and simmered five hours without herb or spice is a grande cuisine orthodoxy. The insistence that seasoning belongs to the finished soup rather than the stock-pot is the practical logic of a kitchen making one foundation each morning and drawing a dozen different soups from it — consommé, purées, thickened white soups — each seasoned to its own end. A five-hour simmer and a separate white stock made from veal are treated as unremarkable daily routine. That two stocks, brown and white, were kept as a matter of course tells you the kitchen ran on a division between dark meat soups and pale ones that modern home cooking has largely collapsed into a single all-purpose broth.