Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › General Stock
General Stock
Take four pounds of any fresh trimmings of lean meat and bones, cut the meat from the bones and break them; put them in a stockpot together with the meat, add a small quantity of salt and five quarts of water. Place the stockpot over the fire and let the contents boil. Skim the stock and then add some scraped and washed carrot, a peeled onion or two and one or two trimmed and washed leeks; cover the pot closely and let the contents boil gently for at least five hours. Strain the stock, pour it into a bowl and allow it to stand in a cold place till it is required for use.
This is the plain brown-free household stock that underpins most of the sauces and soups in the book. Nothing about it is difficult; the variables are the ratio of bones to water, the heat, and how you cool it.
- Quantities in modern termsFive quarts is 20 cups, about 4.7 litres, to 4 lb of meat and bone. Five hours of gentle simmering under a close lid will reduce it somewhat; how much depends on the pot and the heat.
- "Any fresh trimmings"A restaurant kitchen had a constant supply of offcuts; a home cook should buy beef or veal shin, marrow bones and knuckle. Veal knuckle and calf's foot give the gelatine that makes the cold stock set, which is what Oscar's later aspics and sauces depend on.
- This is white stock, not brownNothing is roasted or browned first, so expect a pale, mild liquid rather than the dark stock used for demi-glace.
- "Let the contents boil" then "boil gently"Bring it up once to raise the scum, then hold it at a bare tremble, around 180-190F, with the surface barely moving. A genuine rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and produces cloudy stock that will not clear.
- Cover closely, with careA tight lid traps enough heat to push a large pot back into a boil. Leave it slightly ajar and check that the surface is only shivering.
- The aromatics go in late for a reasonThe aromatics go in after skimming -- Carrot, onion and leek added earlier would otherwise be lost in the scum you lift off. Five hours is long enough to exhaust their flavour, and adding them in the final hour is one alternative.
- Salt sparingly"A small quantity" means very little. The stock will be reduced again in whatever sauce it becomes, and a properly salted stock produces an oversalted sauce.
- Cooling"A cold place" was a larder or icebox. A deep bowl of hot stock left at room temperature sits for hours in the range where spore-forming bacteria thrive, so cool it fast in a sink of iced water, then refrigerate. The fat sets on top as a seal and can be lifted off in one disc.
- KeepingThree or four days refrigerated, or several months frozen. Freezing some of it in ice-cube trays gives you the small quantities the sauce chapters keep asking for.
General stock stands near the front of many professional cookbooks of the period because it was made first every morning: an unseasoned, unbrowned base held in the cold room and drawn on all day for soups, braises, glazes and the flour-thickened sauces of nineteenth-century restaurant cooking. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf in New York -- the Astoria wing came a year later -- and his 1896 book set down the kitchen's working method for a public that was beginning to want hotel food at home. The method is the familiar French white stock, stripped of ceremony: bones broken so the marrow and gelatine can escape, water cold at the start so albumin rises as scum rather than clouding the pot, and a long slow extraction rather than a boil. The absence of a bouquet garni, peppercorns or celery suits a neutral base that could be steered in any direction, with seasoning left to the sauce rather than the stockpot.