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White Stock, Game Stock, Second Stock, and Fish
Stock. Brown Stock is made from shoulder and shin of beef.
White Stock from white meat, veal, calves' feet, fowls, and rabbits.
Game Stock from game of all kinds except wild duck and that class of birds. The breast should be removed and used for entrées, but the rest of the meat and the carcase must be cut up; add a little raw ham or lean bacon, a bouquet garni, and a few peppercorns. If the stock is made only of game and no other meat or bones are used, other stock (second stock) must be added instead of water, but if you have meat as well as game, then use water, but not quite as much water as for brown or white stock.
For Fish Stock use such fish as whiting and cods' heads, conger eels, haddock; not salmon, mackerel, or herrings. This soup is very delicate and nutritious, and therefore suitable for invalids. Take 2 lbs. of fish-bones, 2 quarts of water, an onion,. a carrot, 2 cloves, a small blade of mace, peppercorns, a bouquet garni, and salt. Let it boil up, skim it well, then add the vegetables, and let it simmer slowly until reduced to half its original quantity.
This stock is not clarified, only strained, and is used for fish sauce and fish soups.
Second Stock is made by adding the same quantity of fresh water and fresh vegetables to the meat and bones from which the first stock has been made, adding any remains of meat and bones that you have. Let it simmer for four or five hours, skimming it well. Second stock is used for purées, sauces, and gravies, and for making glaze.
Glaze is stock or second stock boiled down.
This stock must be a jelly or it will not make glaze. Remove the fat and put the stock into a saucepan; as soon as it boils put in one pint of water to a quart of stock to clarify it. It must be carefully watched and skimmed until it will drop as jelly from the spoon; then pour it out at once, or it will burn. Put the glaze into skins or into jars, and when it is cold, cover it over with clarified butter or lard.
Bouillon is unclarified Beef Stock, as Pot-au-feu.
Consommé is the first stock clarified with lean meat, whites of eggs, and vegetables.
To clarify stock use½ lb. of gravy beef to 2 -quarts, and the white and shell of one egg.
It is necessary to deal thus fully with stock, as it is the basis of nearly every soup, sauce, and essence, and the foundation of all meat cookery.
The principal or mother sauces are :- Espagnole, the foundation of nearly all brown sauces.
Suprème, or Velouté, the foundation of all the best white sauces.
Allemande, the foundation of many white fish sauces; and all these require either brown or white stock.
Béchamel is a cheaper white sauce than Suprème Sauce, and is made without stock.
Ritton Polates are thin preces cut off a potato Go a Carl + them hed on a Single knot & fued like a chiphead crumbed may Filet of Jish egg + head crumbed may also le tied on a knot + fried. be tied in or remot + + hied
This is a working brief on the stock cupboard of a late-Victorian professional kitchen rather than a single recipe, though the fish stock is given in full measures. A few of its assumptions need adjusting.
- Fish stock timingReducing 2 quarts by half over a slow simmer will take far longer than fish bones can stand. Modern practice is 20-30 minutes of simmering at most; beyond that the bones give up bitterness and glue rather than flavour. Strain first, then reduce the strained liquid if you want it stronger.
- Which fishThe exclusions are sound and still hold: no salmon, mackerel or herring, whose oils turn rancid and overwhelm. Whiting, cod and haddock frames are ideal. Conger eel is hard to buy now; sole, turbot or monkfish bones substitute well. Rinse the frames and remove gills and any blood, which is the main source of cloudiness and bitterness.
- A blade of maceThe outer aril of nutmeg, sold dried in flat blades. Roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace stands in for a small blade, though the ground spice clouds the stock.
- Bouquet garniHere it means parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string or bound in a leek leaf. No fixed formula is intended.
- Second stockThe French remouillage, literally a re-wetting of bones already used. It is thin by design and belongs in braises, gravies and purees, not in a consomme. Four or five hours is reasonable for beef and veal bones; do not do this with fish.
- ClarifyingHalf a pound of gravy beef to two quarts means lean shin or stewing beef, minced and mixed cold with the egg white and shell, then stirred into cold stock and brought up slowly. Once the raft forms, stop stirring and never let it boil, or it breaks and the stock clouds again.
- GlazeThe pint of water added per quart is there to bring impurities back to the surface for skimming. Watch it closely at the end: reduced stock scorches within seconds and the burnt taste cannot be corrected.
- Storing glaze"Skins" are sausage casings. Meat glaze sealed under butter or lard and kept at room temperature is a low-acid food in an oxygen-free container, which is the classic setting for botulism. Keep glaze refrigerated for a few days, or freeze it in ice-cube trays, and disregard the fat seal.
- The garbled lines at the endThe final sentences are a transcription of a handwritten marginal note and are largely unreadable. The sense appears to be that thin ribbons cut from a potato, or strips of fish fillet, may be tied in a single knot, egged and crumbed, and fried.
This page is a schoolroom summary of the French classical kitchen as it had been absorbed into English professional cookery by the end of the nineteenth century: everything descends from stock, and the sauces descend from four names, Espagnole, Veloute or Supreme, Allemande, and the stockless Bechamel. That hierarchy of grandes sauces predates Escoffier's codification and is generally traced to Careme in the early 1800s; Allemande, later demoted to a derivative thickened with egg yolk and cream, still holds mother-sauce rank here. The economics behind the page are worth noting too. Before commercial bouillon cubes and boxed stock, a kitchen extracted a first stock, then a second from the same bones, then boiled the remainder down to glaze so that nothing left the pot unused, and the resulting hard jelly, cut in cubes and melted into sauces, was the house's concentrated flavour. The remark that fish stock is "delicate and nutritious, and therefore suitable for invalids" reflects a period conviction that clear broths carried nourishment in an easily assimilated form, which is why invalid cookery occupies a chapter in nearly every high-class manual of the era.