Chicken Stock
Cook a fowl in cold water to cover; add seasonings, strain, and use for stock.
A one-line instruction that assumes the cook already knows what a fowl is and how long it takes. The gaps are worth filling in.
- What a "fowl" wasIn 1907 a fowl meant a mature laying hen past her prime, four to six pounds and tough enough to need two or three hours of simmering. A supermarket roasting chicken will give you usable stock in about 90 minutes; if you want the older result, buy a stewing hen or use backs, wings and feet.
- Cold water to coverStarting cold is the whole point of the instruction — proteins and collagen dissolve gradually and the stock stays clear. Covering by an inch or so is plenty; more water means weaker stock, since nothing here is reduced afterward.
- Keep it below a boilThe hinge of the recipe, and the part left unsaid. A bare shiver at around 180–190°F for two to three hours yields clear stock; a rolling boil emulsifies the fat and turns it cloudy and greasy.
- "Seasonings"Left undefined. In books of this date it would usually have covered some combination of onion, cloves, celery tops, carrot, parsley stalks, bay leaf and peppercorns. Add salt sparingly or not at all -- the stock will be reduced in whatever you make from it.
- When to add themThe recipe gives no timing. Modern practice is to add vegetables and herbs for the last hour rather than at the start, on the grounds that three hours of simmering flattens their flavour and can make celery and carrot taste stewed.
- Skim, then strainSkim the grey foam during the first twenty minutes. Strain through a fine sieve or damp cloth, then chill; the fat sets into a cap that lifts off and is worth keeping for frying.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe specifies neither weight nor quantity of water. As a rough guide, a five-pound fowl covered by an inch or so of water will give a couple of quarts of stock. Refrigerated it keeps three to four days, or freeze it.
- The bird itselfThe cooked meat was not wasted: it went into croquettes, salad, hash or a creamed dish. Recipes of this era that begin with meat already cooked are the other half of the same habit.
Lowney's treats stock as a by-product of thrift rather than a dish in its own right -- hence a single sentence where a French manual would spend a page. A fowl was an economic category as much as a culinary one: hens that had stopped laying were sold cheap, too sinewy to roast, and long simmering was the only way to get anything out of them. The stock fed the soup chapter and the sauces, and the boiled meat fed the family, so nothing was lost. The brevity also tells you who the book was for; a cook in 1907 handled whole birds routinely and needed no instruction on the point. Commercial meat extracts and tinned bouillons were already on the market, and the cubes that would eventually displace this habit followed shortly after, but home-made stock remained the assumed foundation of the soup course for some time yet.