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Brown Soup Stock
Carrot. Turnip. Onion. 6 lbs. shin of beef 3 quarts cold water ½ teaspoon peppercorns 6 cloves 1/2 bay leaf 3 sprigs thyme 1 sprig marjoram 2 sprigs parsley 1/2 cup each, cut in dice. 1 tablespoon salt.
This entry gives only the ingredient list; the method that accompanied it in the book is the standard one for brown stock, and the notes below fill in what the list assumes a cook already knows.
- What makes it brownThe distinction from white stock is browning: part of the lean meat is cut small and seared hard, often in marrow fat from the bone, until deeply colored, before the rest of the meat, the bone and the cold water go in. Skip the browning and you have a pale stock with a flat flavor.
- Shin of beefAsk for beef shank, cross-cut, bone in — roughly 6 lb, which is two to three large shanks. The collagen in shin and the marrow in the bone are what give the finished stock body; a lean cut will not gel.
- Cold water, and no lid rushThree quarts of cold water over the meat, left to stand half an hour before heat is applied, draws soluble protein and flavor out of the meat. Bring it up slowly and hold it at a bare tremble — a rolling boil emulsifies fat and clouds the stock past saving.
- TimingSix hours at a simmer is the traditional figure and it is about right for shin. Add the peppercorns, cloves, bay, thyme, marjoram and parsley only for the last hour; simmered the whole time they turn bitter and the herb flavor goes muddy.
- No salt in the listThe list carries no salt, though many comparable stock formulas do. A stock may later be reduced, so seasoning is safest left to the finished soup.
- Skimming and degreasingSkim the gray scum as it rises in the first twenty minutes. The easier route to a clean stock is to strain it, chill it overnight, and lift the solid fat cap off the next morning.
- YieldThree quarts of water will reduce substantially over a long simmer; how far depends on the pot and how hard it is held, so expect somewhere in the region of two quarts of strained stock. Portioned as soup that is several servings, more if used as a sauce base.
- Cooling and keepingStock left to cool slowly in a deep pot sits for hours in the temperature range bacteria favor. Cool it fast in a shallow pan or an ice bath, then refrigerate for up to four days or freeze.
Stock is the first thing the soup chapter of a nineteenth-century American cookbook has to teach. The vocabulary is borrowed straight from French professional kitchens, where fond brun and fond blanc had long been the two foundations, but the cut chosen here is thoroughly domestic. Shin was one of the cheapest pieces on the carcass, tough and sinewy and useless roasted, but rich in the connective tissue that dissolves into gelatin over a long simmer exexactly what a household wanting a good soup at low cost needed. The insistence on cold water, slow heat and no boiling was established in French cookery before Liebig, and was reinforced rather than created by the food chemists' confidence that the goodness of meat could be extracted into water if only it were done correctly.