Glaze
Put a quart of stock into a graniteware or porcelained saucepan and cook very slowly until as thin as syrup and light brown in color. Let cool and use.
This is glace de viande — stock reduced until it is syrupy and will set to a firm jelly when cold. Four lines of text conceal about two hours of watching a pan.
- Read "as thin as syrup" as "as thick as syrup""As thin as syrup" means reduced until it is no thinner than syrup -- The stock begins watery; the point of the exercise is to drive off water until it coats a spoon and moves sluggishly. A quart reduces to roughly half a cup, sometimes less.
- The stock must be unsaltedSalt does not evaporate. Stock seasoned for drinking becomes inedible at an eight-to-one reduction, so use plain stock and season whatever the glaze finally goes into.
- Why graniteware or porcelained wareBare cast iron and untinned copper react with a long, slow, acidic reduction and taint it. Any modern stainless or enamelled pan does the same job; a wide pan reduces faster than a tall one.
- Change pans as it shrinksTransfer the liquid to a progressively smaller saucepan as the volume drops. A shallow film of syrup in a large pan scorches on the exposed sides, and scorch cannot be strained out.
- "Very slowly" is the hingeA hard boil at the end scorches the concentrated solids and turns the glaze bitter and dark rather than glossy brown. Keep it at a bare tremble and stir as it thickens.
- Skim throughoutFat and scum concentrate along with everything else. Skim as it goes, or chill the finished stock first and lift the fat cap off before you begin.
- StorageCooled glaze sets rubbery-firm, like a stiff gelatin. Refrigerated in a covered jar it keeps a week or two; cut into cubes and frozen, for months. A teaspoon dissolved in a pan lifts a gravy or sauce.
- YieldA quart of stock gives about 4 to 6 fluid ounces of glaze — enough to enrich a dozen or more sauces.
Meat glaze is one of the foundations of nineteenth-century professional cooking, the portable concentrate that let a kitchen produce a rich sauce in minutes rather than a day. Carême and the classical French tradition treated glace de viande as a standing item in the larder, and American household books of the turn of the century reproduced it for cooks working without a brigade. Its use with game was practical: venison, hare and wildfowl were usually served with brown sauces, and a spoonful of glaze supplied the body and gloss that a hurried gravy lacked. The insistence on graniteware or porcelained pans is at least suggestive of period practice — enamelled steel was the affordable non-reactive cookware from roughly the 1870s well into the twentieth century, and cooks were often cautioned against long reductions in bare iron or untinned copper.