table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Taking Stock

Tips on making your own chicken,

(Nov. 8, 2007)  Last week was soup week at our house. This year’s soups are Summer Vegetable (peppers, beans, tomatoes, corn), Winter Vegetable (butternut, potato, celeriac, parsnip) and a small quantity of Roasted Pepper (a thick puree of sweet Italians and smoked bells). Now, having used up my stocks, I have to make more.

The late fall and Thanksgiving is perfect for making stocks for the year. True, the average family freezer won’t hold multiple quarts of stock, and canning is time-consuming. But stock is versatile. Frozen, it lasts almost forever, and is happy to be stored in whatever size container you want to recycle — small ones, like individual yogurts, are perfect for giving potent flavor to gravies, sauces and soups.

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In our freezer, any broth without a label is (by default) chicken stock. I think of it as the “universal solvent” of cooking, an anonymous magical elixir that leaves flavor wherever it goes, no matter what the innate nature of the dish. The same is true of mushroom/vegetable stock, particularly with wild mushrooms as a primary constituent. Beef stock is more focused and demands special treatment, while seafood stocks are still more finicky.

The ultimate stock is veal. I do make it, but it is difficult to find the ingredients, and very precious. I reserve its use to a tiny handful of special dishes for company. Anthony Bourdain says, “This is the good and truly useful stuff you want for sauces. It takes a lot of stock to make a relatively small amount of demi glacé, so make as much as you can.” Easy for him to say.

Stock is essential to culinary history. Its fundamental premise is: Let nothing go to waste. Historically, this meant finding a way to eat animals that were not raised strictly to be eaten, animals that had led useful lives as beasts of burden or producers of wool. Or those who had provided eggs and milk for the table, and now arrived there themselves. No sentimentality here: This is the essential vicious cycle of omnivores.

Moreover, in those days, spoilage was a constant threat, so animals were often slaughtered at home, the “waste” providing ample trimmings and bones. A cuisine based on stock demands such ingredients — bones, tough meat, cartilage and fat.

Historically, stock also depends on a plentiful supply of late-harvest vegetables — which might otherwise go to waste — all the cornucopia of the summer combined and reduced to a nuclear essence.

We no longer have such dependence on bits of uneaten meat and vegetable detritus, but the peasant kitchen wasted nothing. And therein lies the essence of stock. Says John Thorne, “Stock speaks of a time when the good housekeeper served the tops she had cut off from the turnips and the poached beef out of which she had made her broth, and then she scraped the serving platters clean. She cut away the bits of meat that might make up a shepherd’s pie and divided the rest between the stockpot and the dripping jar.”

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