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Game Stock
Put the carcasses of two birds and one pint of mirepoix into a saucepan, cover with water, add a pinch of salt, cook for twenty minutes, and it is ready for use.
A working note from a hotel brigade rather than a home recipe: it assumes you already have roast game carcasses on hand and a pot of mirepoix ready on the bench. A few of its terms and timings need translating.
- Mirepoix, 1896 senseIn a kitchen of this period mirepoix means diced carrot, onion and celery with bay and thyme, often sweated in butter and frequently with diced raw ham or salt pork in it. In professional kitchens it was commonly prepared in advance and kept on hand rather than cut fresh to order, though raw versions were also used. A pint is 2 cups.
- Two birdsMost likely the picked carcasses of game birds such as pheasant, partridge, grouse or duck, though the recipe does not say which, nor whether they are roasted or raw. No weight or yield is given: the water is simply whatever covers the pot.
- Twenty minutes is a hotel shortcutTwenty minutes is short -- Short even for bird bones, and it works only if the carcasses are cooked leftovers and the mirepoix already sweated, which the recipe leaves unstated. Modern practice would go 1 to 2 hours for real body and gelatine; bird bones give little after that and the meat scraps turn woolly and bitter.
- Roast the bones if they are rawIf you are starting from raw carcasses rather than the remains of dinner, brown them hard in a hot oven, 425F, until deeply coloured. Otherwise the stock is pale and flat and no amount of simmering will fix it.
- Cover with water, and no moreBarely cover. Game stock is meant to be concentrated, and this quantity of bone drowns easily in a large pot. Skim the grey scum in the first few minutes, keep it at a bare tremble rather than a boil, and do not stir.
- Go light on saltOnly a pinch is called for, which suits a base that will be reduced, sometimes by three quarters, into a sauce: any salt in it concentrates with it. Season the finished sauce, not the stock.
- Straining and keepingStrain through a fine sieve or cloth and cool it quickly -- an ice bath or a shallow pan -- before refrigerating. It keeps three or four days chilled, or freeze it in half-cup portions, which is about what a pan sauce for two wants.
This is one of the foundation entries in Oscar Tschirky's book, and it exists because the classical French system the Waldorf kitchen followed built game sauces on a stock made from the same bird being served. Tschirky was the hotel's maitre d'hotel rather than the chef running the kitchen, a point often noted about the 1896 book that carries his name. The economy is the point: a hotel that sent out roast game had carcasses in quantity every evening, and the twenty-minute stock let a saucier turn last course's bones into this course's sauce without tying up a burner all day. Mirepoix, generally traced to the household of the 18th-century Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, was by the 1890s a standing preparation kept ready in professional kitchens, which is why Oscar can call for a pint of it as casually as a pint of water. Read the entry as a fragment of a system, not a standalone dish -- it makes sense only alongside the espagnole, glaze and salmis recipes it was meant to feed.