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Mixed Stock for Soups
To six pounds of lean beef, with the bones well cracked, add six quarts of water. Put the beef, bones and water in a covered kettle on the stove to heat slowly. Let it boil gently for six hours.
After it has boiled for six hours, strain and set aside well covered until the next day. Before needed, remove the fat, set the soup over the fire and put in a little salt, two carrots, two onions, one turnip, one head of celery. Stew in sufficient water to cover them. When tender, add the vegetables and the water in which they were cooked, to the soup.
Boil slowly for one-half hour. Strain when done. A bay leaf added to the stock before cooking the second day, adds greatly to the flavor.
A plain brown-free beef stock built over two days, with the vegetables cooked separately and added at the end. Almost everything in it still holds; the two things to change are the heat level and where the pot spends the night.
- Never let it boil"Boil gently for six hours" means a bare simmer at 180-190F, with the surface barely trembling and one or two bubbles breaking. A true rolling boil emulsifies the fat and pulverized protein into the liquid and you get cloudy, greasy stock that no amount of straining will clear.
- The overnight restSix quarts of warm stock left covered on the counter sits for hours in the range where Clostridium perfringens multiplies. Cool it fast instead: strain into shallow pans or set the pot in a sink of ice water, then refrigerate once it is below about 70F. The chilled fat lifts off in a solid cap the next day, which is the whole point of the overnight step.
- Quantities and yieldSix pounds of beef to six quarts of water is a generous proportion of meat to liquid, and a six-hour gentle simmer in a covered pot will leave you with something under the starting volume, perhaps four quarts. Halving it works perfectly well in a 6-quart pot.
- The meat and bones"Lean beef with the bones well cracked" means shin, shank or neck bought on the bone. Ask a butcher for cracked knuckle and marrow bones, which supply the gelatin that lean muscle alone will not; supermarket "soup bones" are often sawn already.
- Skim earlyThe recipe says to heat slowly, and slow heating gives you time to deal with the grey scum that rises in the first twenty minutes, though the recipe itself never mentions skimming. Lift it off with a spoon before the liquid gets hot enough to move it around, or it will cloud the pot.
- Vegetables last, and separatelyCooking the carrots, onions, turnip and celery apart for the final half hour is deliberate, not fussiness. Vegetables held for six hours turn to mush and go bitter, particularly the turnip and celery; a short stew keeps their flavor clean and the cooking water is added back so nothing is lost.
- "One head of celery"In period usage this is the whole bunch, not a single rib; modern heads may well run larger than those of a century ago. Four or five ribs with their leaves is closer to the intent.
- SaltKeep it light, as written. This is a base for soups that will be seasoned and possibly reduced later, and a stock salted to taste in the pot becomes unusable once concentrated.
- Keeping itRefrigerated, use within three or four days; it freezes for several months. Reduced hard to a syrupy glaze it keeps far longer in small quantities and reconstitutes with water.
"Mixed stock" is the middle term in a system Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks worked with, alongside the first and second stocks that period books do attest. A household that ran a stockpot did not make soup so much as draw on it, and a good stock was treated as a thing worth mastering early. The two-day method here is a coal-range habit as much as a culinary one: a pot could sit at the back of the stove all day drawing on heat that was already being paid for, and the overnight chill did the work of degreasing without any of the skimming that a hot pot demands. Commercial bouillon cubes and canned broth are what eventually made recipes like this one optional.