Soup Stock
To four pounds of lean beef (the inferior parts are quite as good for this purpose) put four quarts of cold water (soft is best), wash the meat and put it in the water without salt; let it come slowly to boiling point, skim well before the agitation of the water has broken the scum, add a little salt, and a dash of cold water, to assist the scum to rise, skim again, set back and let it boil gently on one side or in one place, and not all over ("the pot should smile, not laugh"), for six or eight hours, until the meat is in rags (rapid boiling hardens the fiber of the meat and the savory flavor escapes with the steam), add a little pepper, strain into a stone jar, let it cool, and remove all the grease. This stock will keep for many days in cold weather, and from it can be made all the various kinds of soups b adding onion, macaroni, celery, asparagus, green pease, carrot, tomato, okra, parsley, thyme, summer savory, sage, and slices of lemon; many of the herbs may be first dried, then pulverized and put in cans or jars for winter use. Celery and carrot seed may be used in place of the fresh vegetables. Macaroni should be first boiled in slightly salted water, cut in pieces one or two inches long, and added a short time before serving. To prepare soup for dinner, cut off a slice of the jelly, add water, heat and serve. Whatever is added to this, such as rice, tapioca, vegetables, etc., may first be cooked before being added, as much boiling injures the flavor of the stock.
A rich stock can also be made from a shank or shin of beef (knuckle of veal is next best); cut in several pieces, crack the bones, add four quarts water, boil up quickly, skim, add salt, skim, and let boil gently until the liquor is reduced one-half; strain, cool and skim, and if boiled properly and long enough, an excellent jelly will result. Too violent boiling makes the stock cloudy and dark. To clarify stock that has been darkened by careless skimming and improper boiling, mix one egg and shell in a gill of cold water, add a gill of the boiling soup, then stir into the soup until it boils up; remove to back of stove, and let stand until the white and shell of the egg have collected the particles that color the soup, and strain once or twice until it looks clear. Stock should never be allowed to stand and cool in the pot in which it is cooked; pour into an earthen dish, let stand to cool uncovered, when all the fat should be removed and saved to clarify for drippings; the stock is then ready for use as wanted for soups or gravies. The flavor of stock may be varied by using in it a little ham, anchovy, sausage, sugar, or a calf's foot. Sprigs of herbs, and whole spices may be used in seasoning, and afterward strained out. Delicate flavors should be added just before serving, as boiling evaporates them. Stock made from meat without bone or gristle will not jelly, but will taste very like good beef- Never boil vegetables with stock, as they will cause it to tea. become sour.
An economical soup-stock may be made of steak or roast-beef bones, after cooking, adding a little piece of fresh meat, or none at all, and allowing it to simmer at least five hours; strain, remove all fat the next day, and it will be ready for use.
A general-purpose beef stock with the period's whole method attached: skimming, gentle simmering, clarifying with egg, and storing the result as jelly. Most of it holds up; the storage advice does not.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: keep it barely moving -- "The pot should smile, not laugh" means the barest simmer; the book asks for a gentle boil on one side or in one place only, with occasional lazy bubbles. A rolling boil emulsifies fat and agitates proteins into suspension, which is exactly what produces the cloudy, dark stock the recipe warns about later.
- Skim before the scum breaksThe grey foam that rises just before the simmer sets in is coagulated protein carrying blood and fine particles. Lift it off in sheets with a shallow spoon while it is still intact; the splash of cold water is a real trick, dropping the temperature so a second raft can form.
- A gillHalf a cup. The clarification calls for one egg with its crushed shell in half a cup cold water, then half a cup hot stock stirred in before adding it back.
- Quantities and yieldFour pounds of beef in four quarts of water, simmered six to eight hours, will lose a good deal to evaporation, though how much depends on the pot and whether it is covered, so expect appreciably less than the four quarts you started with. The shin or shank version is deliberately reduced by half, which by the recipe's own arithmetic means about two quarts of much stronger, gelatin-heavy liquid.
- Why the shin jelliesThe book is right that boneless meat will not set. Gelatin comes from collagen in bone, cartilage and connective tissue, so shank, knuckle and calf's foot are what give the sliceable jelly. Modern supermarkets sell beef shank cross-cut, which is ideal; ask the butcher to split larger bones.
- Do not cook the vegetables in itThe instruction to keep vegetables out and add cooked garnishes at the end is sound. The book's reason, that vegetables sour the stock, is not baseless, since vegetable matter does shorten how long a stored stock keeps; but the more immediate problem is that vegetables go muddy and lose definition over eight hours, and long-cooked onion and carrot make stock sweet and hard to redirect.
- Salt lightly or not at allStock that will be reduced by half, or cut down for gravies, concentrates whatever salt you put in. Season the finished soup, not the pot.
- Ignore the keeping instructionsA stone jar of stock held "many days in cold weather" was safe only in an unheated larder in winter, and even then marginally. Cooked stock left at room temperature is a good medium for Clostridium perfringens and Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive the long simmer. Cool it fast in a wide shallow pan, refrigerate within a couple of hours, and use within three or four days or freeze it.
- The fat capLetting the stock set overnight so the fat lifts off in one disc is still the easiest method. The saved beef fat is worth keeping for frying and roasting potatoes, as the book suggests.
Stock of this kind was the foundation of nineteenth-century soup-making, and cookbooks of the era treated it as infrastructure rather than a dish — a long simmer, poured off into an earthen crock, from which a week of soups and gravies was sliced. The Dixie Cook Book (an 1880s Southern reworking of the widely reprinted Buckeye Cookery) frames it economically, noting that inferior cuts serve as well and that roast bones already once cooked will make a second, thinner stock. The list of things to add is a fair map of the Southern kitchen garden — okra, tomato, summer savory, thyme, sage — and the aside about drying and pulverizing herbs for winter jars is a reminder that year-round fresh seasoning was not yet a given. The egg-and-shell clarification is much older than the book: it is the ancestor of the classic consommé raft, the egg protein setting through the liquid and trapping suspended particles as it rises.