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Medium Stock

A stock made from beef or veal shins, poultry bones, bacon or ham, onions, turnip, carrots, leek, celery, salt, pepper, mace, savory, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Medium Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the meat and bacon or ham into pieces about 3 inches square.

  2. Rub the butter on the bottom of a large stewpan.

Make the stock

  1. Add ½ pint of water, the meat, and all other ingredients to the stewpan.

  2. Cover the stewpan and place it on a stove, stirring occasionally.

  3. When the bottom of the pan is covered with a pale, jelly-like substance, add 4 quarts of cold water.

Simmer and strain

  1. Simmer very gently for 5 hours, ensuring it does not boil quickly.

  2. Skim off any grease while cooking and strain through a fine hair sieve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Shin of beef or knuckle of veal
Collagen breaks down into gelatin during long simmering, giving the stock body and a silky mouthfeel.
Bacon or ham
Cured pork adds salty, savory depth to the broth.
Onions
Cooking onions slowly releases mellow, sweet aromatics into the stock.
Carrots
Sweet aromatic vegetables add background sweetness and rounded flavor.
Butter
A thin layer of fat on the pan helps the meat start to brown and carries flavor.

The step that matters

Keep the stock at a gentle simmer. Vigorous boiling churns fat and particles into the liquid, making the stock cloudy and greasy. A slow, barely moving simmer lets collagen dissolve into gelatin while the broth stays clear.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, meat, ham, butter, onion, turnip, carrot):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, meat, ham, butter, onion, turnip, carrot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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