Bountiful Stock

 

Yesterday's market was a feast in the making of full-spring bounty: the first fava beans of the season, baby carrots and turnips, green garlic, and on and on, to the point that we risked taking too much home.  

It will take several posts to talk about what we did with all of this, but at the moment we'll talk about making stock as the foundation of a myriad other dishes.  From Cache Creek Poultry, our local chicken farmer, we took home a stewing hen, something we'd read about it but neither seen nor cooked before.  A stewing hen is an older female chicken, an egg-layer, who has passed her prime, so that her meat would be too tough for a regular roast, but which is perfect for the stew pot.  The whole hen will simmer in water for twelve hours or more with a bunch of aromatic vegetables (onions, celery and carrots, plus parsley and a handful of other garden herbs), to make what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "The liquour made by boiling meat (without or without vegetables, etc.) and used as a foundation for soup." 

We're not vegetarians; but we have been trying, like so many others, to no longer think of meat as the center of every meal, the way it was when I was growing up.  Rather than always thinking of a meal as a piece of cooked meat seasoned and adorned with vegetables, spices and herbs, we sometimes try to  reverse the process:  that is, think of the savory flavors and aromas of meat as a seasoning for vegetables — the way it often is in traditional Italian cooking, where a small amount of chopped ham or bacon often lends its salty savor to a range of other dishes where the vegetables are otherwise invited to dominate.

Still, a stewing hen is perhaps not for those who prefer to deny that they are eating something that used to be an animate creature, that could see and walk and make noise.  It comes as a whole bird, with the head and feet still attached.  In supermarket chickens, of course, these are carefully removed and hence made invisible to the fastidious consumer.  (Actually, Cache Creek can also sell you one with these removed but we wanted to try it in the traditional way, where the head and feet are said to be a source of flavor in the stock.  Hey, if you're going to consume something, you might as well consume it all.)

The word “stock” itself is a fascinating one.  Here’s how we would summarize, very quickly, a few bits of a very long etymology by which the word comes to have, among all of its other varied senses, the meaning it has in cuisine.  A 'stock” originally meant a large piece of wood in either of two rather different senses: on the one hand, a “trunk,” and on the other hand, a “log.”  In English, going back to very early usages, a “stock” was often used to mean something like “lifeless thing” or “block.”  For example, the expression “stocks and stones” was used in early Christian discourse to refer to idols, to underline their inanimate lifelessness as opposed to the proper invisible deity.  But the other meaning, by which a stock was a trunk, a source or foundation for further development and growth, would have a much longer history.  It seems to be in English that the word “stock,” for somewhat obscure reasons, came to have the meanings fund, store or source, and therefore became the historical antecedent of our word “capital” in the financial and economic sense.  In different contexts, “stock” has meant and often still can mean such things as the amount of product available for sale at a certain business, or a sum of money intended for investment (today we would say “capital”), or the name for a “share” in a business venture.  Strangely enough, it is this sense that seems to condition the culinary meaning.  The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, cites Charles Carter’s The Complete Practical Cook from 1730: where it is affirmed that “A good Stock of strong Broth Well made, and good Gravies well drawn off, are very principal Ingredients in the Composing of all Made-Dishes of boil'd Meats.”  A stock is thus a base and foundation for other dishes, the source from which they will slowly develop and emerge.  

We bring the hen to a simmer in a large pot covered with cold water, skim the white foam that rises to the top, and then add a bunch of vegetables: 2-3 onions, 2-3 carrots, 2-3 sticks of celery, a few garlic cloves, and a handful of herbs (parsley, thyme, bay leaves) tied together to form a bouquet garni — leek greens are also a good addition, though don't overdo them.  (By the way, you can do the same thing with a regular cut-up chicken or with chicken parts; but the stew hen seems to us to produce a much more complex and rich flavor.  We also always freeze the carcasses of roast chickens, which can be also be used to make a serviceable chicken stock)  

We leave this on at first at a very slow simmer, partially covered, all night long.  When it's done, drain in a fine sieve, and let it cool.  There will be an inch or so of thick yellow fat on the top which can be removed and discarded. 

It's now already a flavorful broth which can be eaten by itself or with the addition of some vegetables and noodles.  But we usually then bring the stock back to a boil and reduce it about half way or more, to make it easier to freeze in small containers.  When defrosting, you can always add more fresh water if you want a soup base, or add it in its reduced form to the liquid of a stew or braise.  If you continue reducing it even further, you'll eventually get a thick brown paste which is close to  what the French call demi-glace (except that the latter almost always also has beef or veal bones browned and added to the stock mix.)

In other posts we'll try to give some suggestions of what can be done with this wonderful liquid, which is a veritable cooking elixir, a foundation for all kinds of wonderful other things to eat.  We'll also later write about vegetable stocks, which can also be a great foundation for flavor.