Home › Soups › White Soup Stock III
White Soup Stock III
The water in which a fowl or chicken is cooked makes White Stock.
A single sentence standing in for a whole procedure: Farmer assumes you have just poached a fowl for fricassee or salad and are looking at the pot afterward. What follows fills in what she left unsaid.
- What "white" meansWhite stock is simply stock made without browning — no roasted bones, no seared meat, no caramelized vegetables. The pale colour is the point, since it goes into cream soups, veloutés and white sauces where a brown stock would muddy the look.
- Skim early, and keep it below a boilThe hinge of the whole thing. Bring the fowl up slowly and skim the grey scum as it rises, then hold the pot at a bare shiver. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives albumin into suspension, and the stock turns cloudy and greasy in a way no later straining will fix.
- A "fowl" is not a chickenIn period usage a fowl meant an older laying hen, tough, fatty and full of collagen — hours of gentle cooking gave a stock that set to jelly. A supermarket broiler-fryer gives thinner, blander liquid. Backs, wings and feet, or a labelled stewing hen, get you closer.
- AromaticsPeriod stock recipes generally lean on onion, carrot, celery, a few peppercorns, cloves and a bay leaf. Keep aromatics pale here: no browned onion, and go easy on carrot if you want a genuinely white result.
- Strain and cool properlyStrain through a fine sieve or damp cloth without pressing the solids, then chill fast — a shallow pan, or the pot set in ice water. The fat cap lifts off cleanly the next day. Refrigerate up to three days, or freeze.
- YieldAs a rough guide, a 4–5 lb bird just covered with water will give something in the region of 2 to 3 quarts of stock, though the recipe specifies nothing. Season only when the stock reaches its final use, since it will be reduced further.
White stock belongs to the French kitchen hierarchy that American cooking schools imported wholesale in the late nineteenth century: brown stock for gravies and consomm ed and white sauces that dominated genteel American menus of the 1890s. The numbered stocks of this kind are often traced to Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896), and this third version is the household shortcut o just the poaching liquid from one already cooked for another dish. That thrift is the tell.