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Brown Stock
(Sugo di Carne) Cover the bottom of a saucepan with thin slices of beef taken from a juicy cut and small pieces of salt pork. Place over a large onion, one carrot, and a stalk of celery, all chopped in small pieces. Add some butter and cover the whole with any trimmings from steaks or roasts and any bit of left over cooked meat. Season with salt and cloves. Put over the fire without stirring. When you smell the onions getting very brown, turn the meat and when everything is quite brown add a cup of water, renewing the latter three times. Finally add a certain quantity of boiling water or, better still, of broth, and let it boil gently five or six hours. Strain, cool and skim off the fat which will form a cake on top of the liquid.
The meat can be used afterward for meat balls or Croquettes. The stock may be kept for some days and forms the basis for many dishes. 14
This is a brown stock built by dry-browning meat and vegetables in the pan, then deglazing three times before the long simmer. The original gives no quantities at all, so the technique matters more than any list.
- The hinge: do not stirThe meat and onion must sit undisturbed on a fairly brisk heat until you can smell the onion turning dark and a brown film sets on the pan bottom. That fond, dissolved by the successive additions of water, is the entire colour and depth of the stock. Stirring early steams everything and gives you a pale, thin liquid.
- The three watersAdd about a cup of water and let it cook away completely so the pan re-browns, then renew it as the recipe directs; it says "renewing the latter three times", which may mean three additions in all or three more after the first. Each cycle lays down and lifts another layer of fond. Skipping to the full quantity of liquid is the commonest way this recipe fails.
- Quantities to work fromFor a usable batch, about 2 lb of beef shin or chuck in thin slices, 4 oz salt pork, one large onion, one carrot, one celery stalk, 2 tablespoons butter, and 2 to 3 whole cloves. Finish with 2 to 3 quarts of boiling broth or water. Yield is roughly 2 quarts of strained stock.
- Salt pork and the saltSalt pork is very salty and the stock reduces for hours. Season lightly at the start and correct only after straining, or the finished sugo will be too salty to use in a sauce.
- Cloves"Season with cloves" most likely means whole cloves rather than ground; two or three is enough. Clove dominates a long simmer quickly, and more than three will read as spice cake rather than meat.
- The simmerFive or six hours at a bare tremble, lid ajar. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat back into the liquid and clouds it, which defeats the fat cake you want at the end.
- Keeping itThe instruction to keep it "some days" assumed a cold larder; note that the recipe has you skim the fat cake off rather than leave it in place. Chill it fast, refrigerate no more than three or four days, and bring it fully back to the boil before use; otherwise freeze it in portions. The skimmed fat is worth saving separately for frying.
- The spent meatAfter six hours the beef has given up nearly everything. For the meat balls or croquettes suggested, it needs to be chopped rather than sliced and rebuilt with egg, breadcrumb, cheese and parsley.
Sugo di carne in older Italian usage means a concentrated brown meat essence rather than the tomato sauce the word suggests to most English speakers now; it is the Italian counterpart of French jus or fond brun, spooned into risotti, over pasta, or into braises to give body. Its placement near the front of the book, among the broths and sauces, is telling: this was not a soup base but a flavouring, made once and drawn on all week. The Italian Cook Book, compiled by Maria Gentile and published in New York in 1919 for Italian-American households, is often said to lean on the domestic tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina (1891) opens likewise with the stocks and broths assumed to be standing ready in any competent kitchen. The vagueness about quantities is characteristic of that tradition, and of this recipe's real purpose: it is a way of using trimmings, so the amounts depend on what the week's roasts and steaks left behind.