Stock, Economical
INGREDIENTS. The liquor in which a joint of meat has been boiled, say 4 quarts; trimmings of fresh meat or poultry, shank-bones, &c., roast-beef bones, any pieces the larder may furnish; vegetables, spices, and the same seasoning as in the foregoing recipe. AVERAGE COST, 3d. per quart.
Let all the ingredients simmer gently for 6 hours, taking care to skim carefully at first. Strain it off, and put by for use.
TIME.-6 hours.
A salvage recipe rather than a formula: the point is that the water a joint was boiled in, plus bones and larder scraps, becomes stock. A few things need translating.
- The quantityFour quarts is 16 cups, about 3.8 litres. The recipe does not say whether the pot is covered; six hours of simmering will reduce the volume appreciably, so expect rather less than four quarts at the end.
- "The same seasoning as in the foregoing recipe"In Beeton's stock recipes this generally means the usual aromatics: onion, carrot, turnip, celery, a bunch of savoury herbs, a few peppercorns and cloves, and salt. Season lightly, since liquor from a boiled joint may already be salted.
- Salt is the real riskLiquor from a boiled joint, especially a salted one such as salt beef, ham or bacon, can be too salty to reduce. Taste before you commit six hours to it, and if it is already assertive, dilute with water or use it unreduced.
- SkimmingThe instruction to skim carefully at first is the hinge. Scum rises in the first twenty minutes as proteins coagulate; take it off then, and never let the pot reach a rolling boil, or the fat and albumen emulsify into the liquid and the stock turns cloudy and greasy.
- Six hoursReasonable for beef bones, too long for poultry trimmings, which give everything they have in two to three hours and then start tasting flat. If your scraps are mostly chicken, cut the time.
- Vegetables lateModern practice often adds the vegetables for the last hour rather than at the start, on the grounds that six hours reduces carrot and turnip to sweet mush and can flatten or sour celery.
- Storing"Put by for use" assumed a cold larder and daily reboiling. Cool it fast, chill, lift the set fat off the top, and use within three or four days, or freeze. Stock left at room temperature is a good growth medium.
- CostThreepence a quart is the whole argument of the recipe: the meat liquor and bones were already paid for, so what remains is the cost of the additions and the fuel.
Beeton's household books are organised around the principle that nothing bought should be thrown away, and this entry is that principle in its purest form: the water left in the pot after boiling a joint becomes the base of soups and gravies. The economical version depends on a kitchen rhythm that has largely gone — a cool larder, a stockpot kept going, and a cook at home to skim it. Nineteenth-century domestic manuals generally treat the perpetual stockpot as a mark of a well-run kitchen, though by Beeton's day some writers were already warning that a pot kept too long without reboiling was a source of illness rather than economy.