No. 195

Game, Vegetable, Fish and Chicken Stock, for Thick Soups

Fonds de Gibier, Legumes, Poisson et Volaille pour Potages Lies

In order to make thick stock use consomme of game, vegetables, fish or chicken before they are clarified. Place half a pound of butter in a saucepan with half a pound of sifted flour of the best quality, let cook well on a slow fire without coloring when needed for vegetables, fish or chicken, but for game make a brown roux; for either one or the other dilute this roux with boiling broth (if the soup should be a chicken soup, chicken broth should be used to dilute the roux, if game soup then game broth should be used, fish with fish broth, for vegetable, vegetable broth). Use a whisk turning it rapidly, so as to avoid having lumps; stocks for soups should be kept rather thin, that is to say but little thickened and should be well despumated, the fat removed before passing through the tammy; return the saucepan to the fire, and stir continuously with a spatula from the bottom until the broth boils. Remove the saucepan and place it so that only one side of the contents cook slowly for one hour; skim and take off all the matter that swims on the surface until the stock be entirely free from fat, and other impurities floating on top arising from the clarification, then strain through a tammy or fine sieve, and use this stock for thick soups either of game, vegetables, fish or poultry.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is not a soup but a base: a velouté-style thickened stock built on equal weights of butter and flour, matched to whatever broth the finished soup calls for. Ranhofer assumes you already have consommé on hand and know what a tammy is.

The hinge: cook off-centerAfter the first boil the pan is drawn half off the heat so only one side simmers. The convection current carries fat, scum and albumen to the cool side, where you skim it away — the technique French kitchens call dépouiller, and the reason for the hour of slow cooking. A pan centered over even heat clears itself far less readily.
QuantitiesHalf a pound of butter and half a pound of flour is a full pound of roux. The recipe never says how much broth to add, and the amount is genuinely open: Ranhofer only tells you the result should be "rather thin." As a working target, a pound of roux will lightly thicken roughly 5 to 6 quarts of stock for soup purposes.
Sifted flour of the best qualityPlain all-purpose flour, sifted. Nineteenth-century milling was less consistent, which may be behind the emphasis; sifting still matters here because dry lumps in the roux survive whisking.
White roux versus brownFor fish, vegetable and chicken, cook the butter and flour over low heat without color, long enough to lose the raw taste — a few minutes. For game, take it to a nut-brown, which takes considerably longer with steady stirring and thickens noticeably less than a pale roux. The recipe itself gives no timings.
Boiling broth into the rouxRanhofer specifies boiling liquid whisked rapidly. This works, but add it in stages rather than all at once, and match the broth to the soup — chicken roux gets chicken broth, fish gets fish. The original is explicit on that matching.
DespumatedAn old kitchen word for thoroughly skimmed and clarified — literally de-scummed. In practice: skim every few minutes for the full hour, and blot the last film of fat off the surface with paper.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two cooks twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois, or a conical strainer lined with damp muslin, does the same job.
StorageThe finished stock keeps 3 to 4 days refrigerated and freezes well. Chill it fast in a shallow pan rather than leaving a deep pot of thickened stock to cool slowly on the counter.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its organization is straight out of the French professional tradition: foundations first, finished dishes after. What Ranhofer calls a fonds pour potages liés is essentially a velouté made thin — the same butter-and-flour roux slackened with broth that Carême codified in the 1820s and 1830s as one of the mother sauces, here scaled down in body so it thickens a soup without turning it into a sauce. The insistence on matching broth to roux, and on an hour of off-center simmering to drive out fat and starch impurities, marks it as brigade cooking. The word despumated, from the Latin for removing froth, already had an old-fashioned air in English by Ranhofer's day and survived mainly in cookery and pharmacy.