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White Soup Stock II
4 lbs. knuckle of veal 2 quarts cold water 1 tablespoon salt Blade of mace ½ teaspoon peppercorns 1 onion 2 stalks celery Wipe meat, remove from bone, and cut in small pieces. Put meat, bone, water, and seasonings in kettle. Heat gradually to boiling-point, skimming frequently. Simmer four or five hours, and strain. If scum has been carefully removed, and soup is strained through double thickness of cheesecloth, stock will be quite clear.
A plain veal stock of the sort Fannie Farmer treated as the base for cream soups and white sauces. The whole point is clarity, and everything in the method serves that.
- Skim before it boilsThe scum rises in the first fifteen minutes as the water heats; once the pot reaches a rolling boil the albumin breaks up and clouds the stock permanently. Heat slowly, skim as often as foam appears, and hold the pot at a bare tremble thereafter.
- Knuckle of vealThis is the lower leg joint, sold today as veal shank or osso buco-style cross-cuts, plus the knuckle bone itself. Ask a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock it. Veal breast or neck bones with a little meat will give a similar pale, gelatinous stock.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed. A "blade" is one such piece; equivalents given for ground mace vary, roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon. A whole blade can be lifted out after cooking, and unlike grated nutmeg it leaves no specks in a stock meant to be pale.
- Water levelTwo quarts over four pounds of meat and bone is close, and five hours of simmering will reduce it considerably. Keep the solids covered, topping up with boiling water if needed, and expect somewhere between one and one and a half quarts of finished stock.
- SaltA tablespoon in two quarts is a lot for a stock that will be reduced and then seasoned again in a soup. Use a teaspoon or leave it out entirely and salt the finished dish.
- StrainingLadle rather than pour, leaving the last cloudy inch behind, and let the stock drip through the cheesecloth without pressing the solids. Squeezing the cloth undoes five hours of careful skimming.
- Cooling and keepingCool it quickly in a shallow pan rather than leaving the kettle on the stove, then refrigerate. The fat sets in a disc you can lift off, and a good veal stock will be firmly jellied. Three to four days refrigerated, several months frozen.
White stock is one of the two foundations of the classical French kitchen carried into American cookery through books like this one: a pale, neutral, heavily gelatinous liquid built from veal, as opposed to the brown stock made from roasted beef. Veal is used because it gives body without color or strong flavor, which is why it underlies the whole family of white soups and sauces, from cream of celery to veloute. Farmer's insistence that the pot be brought up slowly and skimmed frequently reflects a period when a clear consomme was a visible mark of a competent kitchen, and cheesecloth straining might be thought of as the household counterpart to the professional's clarification with egg white. Numbering the recipe "II" places it among several variants she offered.