White Stock
1 large chicken. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 onion. 2 qts. water. 1/2 cup celery, chopped fine.
Cut chicken into pieces, put in the two quarts of water, add salt and let simmer for several hours, or until perfectly cooked. Add celery and onion and simmer one-half hour longer. Strain and it is ready for use. The meat can be used for salad, hash or creamed chicken.
The fireless cooker is a great help in making stocks, soups and all meats that require long cooking.
A plain chicken stock, with the vegetables held back until the last half hour so their flavor stays fresh. A few things in the method reward attention.
- Keep it at a bare simmerThe hinge of a white stock is that it never boils. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives fine protein into suspension, and the result is cloudy and slightly greasy rather than clear. Hold it at 180-190F, with the surface barely trembling.
- Skim earlyMrs. Wilson does not mention it, but the gray foam that rises in the first twenty minutes should be lifted off with a spoon. Once it is stirred back in, no amount of straining will give you a clear stock.
- "1 large chicken"This meant a whole bird, and in a stock recipe of this era often an older stewing fowl rather than a young one. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken works, and a pound of added wings or backs will improve the body, since modern birds are younger and less gelatinous.
- SaltOne teaspoon in two quarts is light. Stock is a base that will be reduced later, so it is best left underseasoned and salted in the finished soup or sauce.
- "Several hours"Two to three hours is enough for a young bird; the meat is worth eating at about ninety minutes, so lift it out then if you want it for the salad or hash she suggests and return the bones to the pot.
- The onionLeave it whole or halved, and peel it; the skin leaches colour into the pot. Do not brown it either, since browned onion gives colour, which defeats the purpose here.
- Fireless cookerAn insulated box that held preheated food at temperature for hours without fuel. A slow cooker on low, or a covered pot in a 200-250F oven, does the same job.
- Yield and keepingExpect five to six cups after straining. Chill it uncovered until cold, then lift off the cap of fat; it keeps four days refrigerated or several months frozen.
White stock is one half of the classical French pair — fond blanc against fond brun, the difference being simply whether the bones and aromatics are browned first — and by the time Mrs. Wilson was writing, that distinction had been absorbed into American domestic-science teaching as a matter of course. Her aside about the fireless cooker places the page loosely in its era: these insulated cookers were sold from the 1900s into the 1920s and promoted heavily during and just after the First World War as a fuel-saving device, and a stockpot that wanted six hours of low heat was exactly the argument for owning one. The instruction to use the boiled meat for salad, hash or creamed chicken is equally of its period, when a bird was expensive enough that a cook would be unlikely to treat it as spent flavoring, and the strained broth was almost the byproduct rather than the point.