Strong Stock
INGREDIENTS.-4 lbs. of shin of beef, 4 lbs. of knuckle of veal, 1/4 lb. of Line a delicately-clean stewpan with the ham, cut in thin broad slices, carefully trimming off all its rusty fat; cut up the beef and veal in pieces about 3 inches square, and lay them on the ham; set it on the stove, and draw it down, and stir frequently. When the meat is equally browned, put in the beef and veal bones, the poultry trimmings, and pour in the cold water. Skim well, and occasionally add a little water, to stop its boiling, until it be comes quite clear; then put in all the other ingredients, and simmer very slowly for 5 hours. Do not let it come to a brisk boil, that the stock be not wasted, and that its colour may be preserved. Strain through a very fine hair sieve, or cloth, and the stock will be fit for use.
TIME.-5 hours.
This is Mrs Beeton's foundation brown stock, the base she draws on for clear soups and brown sauces. The ingredient line has been mangled in transcription, so read the method carefully — several items it calls for are never listed.
- The missing ingredient listThe text breaks after "1/4 lb. of" and jumps into the method, so the water and vegetables are lost; the quarter-pound is presumably the ham the method goes on to use. From the instructions you need: 4 lb shin of beef, 4 lb knuckle of veal, about 4 oz raw ham, the bones from both joints, any poultry trimmings, and cold water to cover generously — on the order of 4 quarts. The "other ingredients" added later would conventionally be onion, carrot, turnip, celery, a bouquet of herbs, a few cloves and peppercorns, and salt.
- "Draw it down"An old range instruction, generally understood as drawing the pan away from the fiercest heat once the meat has taken colour, so the juices sweat out and reduce to a glaze without scorching. On a gas or electric hob, brown over medium-high heat, then drop to low and let the meat stick and caramelise, stirring so nothing burns black. This browning is what gives strong stock its colour and depth.
- StewpanA wide, straight-sided pan with a lid — a heavy stockpot or Dutch oven of at least 8 quarts. You want enough surface area to brown 8 lb of meat in something close to a single layer.
- Cold water, and never a brisk boilThis is the hinge. Cold water started slowly draws albumen to the surface where it can be skimmed; a rolling boil emulsifies fat and dissolved protein back into the liquid and gives cloudy, grey stock. Keep it at a bare tremble, 180–190F, for the whole five hours.
- "Add a little water to stop its boiling"A cook's trick from the open-fire era, where heat could not be turned down quickly: a splash of cold water knocks the pot off the boil and lifts fresh scum. With a controllable hob you can simply lower the flame, but the splash still works and does no harm.
- Five hours is rightUnlike many Victorian timings, this one holds. Shin and knuckle are collagen-rich cuts that need long, slow heat to convert to gelatin — the reason a properly made strong stock sets firm when cold. Vegetables added at the four-hour mark rather than at the start will taste fresher, which is the one departure worth making.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the fine strainer of the period. Use a fine mesh sieve lined with damp muslin or a coffee filter cloth, and let the stock drip rather than pressing it through — pressing forces fine solids into the liquid and clouds it.
- Yield, and what to do with itExpect around 2 to 2 1/2 quarts of finished stock. Chill it fast in a shallow pan, lift the set fat off the top, and keep it no more than three days refrigerated; it freezes well, and reduced to a glaze it will keep for months. Boiled bones and meat that has given five hours are exhausted, whatever thrift suggests.
"Strong stock" belongs to a loosely graded hierarchy of stocks that Victorian kitchens are often said to have inherited from French professional practice, running from richer first stocks down through weaker ones drawn from the same bones for everyday gravies, though no fixed system of that kind is documented here. The distinguishing marks of the strong version are the veal knuckle, which supplies gelatin and body, and the initial browning of the meat, which supplies colour — the same principle as an estouffade or brown stock in Escoffier a generation later. That a household manual expects a cook to commit eight pounds of beef and veal plus a quarter-pound of ham to a pan of liquid says a good deal about the servant-keeping households Beeton wrote for, and about a period when stock was the invisible foundation of nearly every made dish rather than something bought in a carton. Later editions of the Book of Household Management, from which this entry descends, were compiled and expanded by publishers long after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865, which is why the reference-style alphabetical arrangement here differs from her original chapters.