Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Dark Stock
Dark Stock
Secure a piece from the shin or lower part of a round of beef, with an equal weight of bones, and place the latter in a stockpot. Wipe the meat over with a cloth dipped in cold water and cut it into nice-sized pieces. Peel the required quantity of onions and fry them in butter until they are darkly browned; then put in the pieces of meat and brown them also. Put the meat in the stockpot with the bones, add any other trimmings of meat that may be convenient, fill the pot with cold water and place it over the fire. When the liquor boils take the stockpot off the fire, remove the scum, put in the browned onions with some prepared carrots, turnips, celery, a bunch of sweet herbs and a flavoring of allspice, ground pepper, celery seed, cloves and salt; add also one tablespoonful of caramel. Keep the stock simmering slowly at the edge of the fire until the meat is in shreds, then strain it through a hair-sieve into a basin. It should never be allowed to remain in an iron kettle after it is made. Set the basin in a cool place, keeping it uncovered. Leave the fat which forms at the top of the stock in a thick cake until the stock is needed, as it excludes the air and thus assists in keeping the stock. It will be preserved at least a week longer in winter if no vegetables are used. A little fresh charcoal tied in a muslin bag and boiled in the stock is said to restore it when only slightly changed.
A classic brown beef stock, written for a hotel kitchen where a stockpot ran all day and quantities were left to the cook's judgment. The cooking method holds up; the storage advice at the end does not.
- The hinge: never let it boilAfter the first boil and skim, the pot goes to the edge of the fire and stays at a bare shiver, somewhere around 180-190F, for the whole cooking. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and drives fine particles through the liquid, and ordinary straining will not clear it afterward.
- Proportions, since none are givenThe recipe specifies equal weights of shin meat and bones and nothing else: the water is simply whatever fills the pot, and the onions and root vegetables are left to the cook. If you want a starting point, a pound each of meat and bones per quart of water with vegetables at about a quarter the weight of the meat will work, but that is a modern guess, not the book's. Shin is the right cut: it is full of collagen, which is what gives the finished stock its body.
- "Caramel"Not caramel sauce or candy. This is burnt-sugar colouring, sugar cooked past bitterness and let down with water, sold in the period as a browning agent. Modern gravy browning is the same thing. A tablespoon is purely cosmetic and can be left out if the onions and meat have been browned properly.
- Timing and yield"Until the meat is in shreds" means about 4 to 5 hours for shin. Expect a fair loss to evaporation over that time; how much strained stock you get back depends entirely on how hard the pot is simmering.
- Hair-sieveA fine sieve woven from horsehair. A chinois or a conical strainer lined with damp muslin does the same job; ladle rather than pour, and do not press the solids or the stock will cloud.
- The iron kettle warningSound advice, and still true of bare cast iron and unlined copper, which react with the acid and salt in stock and give it a metallic taste and grey cast. Stainless, enamelled iron and glass are all fine.
- Ignore the keeping instructionsCooling uncovered in a "cool place" and holding it for a week under a cake of fat belongs to the cold larder, not the modern kitchen. The fat seal is not sterile and stock held for days in the danger zone is a recognised vehicle for Clostridium perfringens. Chill fast in a shallow pan, refrigerate up to three or four days, or freeze.
- And ignore the charcoalBoiling charcoal in stock that has "only slightly changed" was a period trick for masking off odours. It removes the smell, not the bacteria or the toxins some of them leave behind. Stock that smells sour or tastes fizzy goes out.
Oscar Tschirky was the maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, not its chef, but the 1896 cookbook that carries his name is often read as a record of the working practice of a large American hotel kitchen at a time when French technique was becoming its standard. Dark stock, the fond brun of the French repertoire, was the foundation of the whole brown sauce family, and a hotel was traditionally said to keep a stockpot going continuously, feeding it trimmings and bones that would otherwise be wasted. The tablespoon of caramel belongs to a period in which a consistently deep colour was expected of every brown sauce regardless of how well the meat had browned that day; such colouring appears just as freely in domestic cookbooks of the period. The closing notes on the fat cake and the charcoal bag are equally of their time: iceboxes were common but far from universal, and a great deal of nineteenth-century kitchen lore concerned keeping perishable food a few days longer than it wanted to be kept.