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Shin of Beef Stock for Gravies

A stock made by simmering shin of beef with water, salt, herbs, peppercorns, and mace for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,969 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Shin of Beef Stock for Gravies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bones

  1. Break the bone of the shin of beef in one or two places.

  2. Remove the marrow and clarify it, then store the clarified marrow for future use.

Make the stock

  1. Combine the beef with 9 pints of cold water in a pot.

  2. Stew gently for 6 to 7 hours, or longer until the meat is in fragments.

  3. Add the savory herbs, peppercorns, and mace during the last hour of cooking.

Store

  1. Store the stock in a cool place.

  2. Boil softly for 2-3 minutes every few days.

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. Beef + macetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,969 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Shin of beef
Bone and meat release gelatin and flavour into the water during long, gentle stewing.
Savory herbs
Add aromatic flavour to the stock when added near the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 6 to 7 hours. A gentle simmer extracts gelatin and flavour from the bones and meat without clouding the stock. Boiling hard emulsifies fat into the liquid and makes the stock cloudy and greasy.

“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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