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Mixed Stock

A stock made by simmering meat trimmings and bones with water, salt, onion, garlic, peppercorns, thyme, and bay leaf.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mixed Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cover the trimmings and bones with cold water.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of coarse sea salt for each quart of water.

Simmer

  1. Cook slowly for about 4 hours.

  2. Add half an onion, cloves, peppercorns, thyme, and bay leaf.

  3. Simmer for 2 hours longer.

Finish

  1. Strain and cool quickly.

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. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Meat + thymetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,008 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat and bone trimmings
Provide the collagen and flavour that give the stock body and savour during long simmering.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savoury depth to the stock's background flavour.
Peppercorns
Contribute gentle, warm aromatic spice that infuses the liquid slowly.
Thyme
Adds herbal aroma that carries through the long simmer.
Bay leaf
Adds a subtle herbal, slightly bitter aroma to the stock.

The step that matters

Strain and cool quickly. Cooling the stock quickly moves it through the temperature range where bacteria multiply fastest, reducing spoilage risk. Straining removes solids that would otherwise keep cooking and turn the stock cloudy or bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, clove, thyme):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, clove, thyme. 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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