Skip to main content
Main

Brown Stock

A stock made from mutton, vegetables, butter, celery seed, herbs, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Brown Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Turn the meat out of the tin into a quart of boiling water and set aside to cool.

  2. Prepare the vegetables by cutting them up as usual.

Make the stock

  1. In a saucepan, combine the vegetables, remaining quart of water, butter, herbs, and celery seed.

  2. Cook until tender.

  3. Skim off the cold fat that rises to the top of the water.

  4. Add the contents of the saucepan to the remaining stock in the pan.

  5. Season with salt and pepper.

  6. Simmer for a few minutes until the meat and vegetables can be rubbed through a 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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Tinned mutton
Provides the meat flavour and body that give the stock its character.
Butter
Adds richness, and its fat carries flavour through the stock.
Onions
Add savoury depth and gentle sweetness as they cook down into the liquid.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stock as they soften.
Turnip
Adds a mild earthy flavour and body as it softens.

The step that matters

Skim off the cold fat. Fat floats on water and turns solid when cold, so it lifts off easily. Removing it leaves a cleaner, less greasy stock.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, celery, pepper, carrot, turnip):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, celery, pepper, carrot, turnip. 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.

More brown stock recipes

Clear 6 See all 56 →

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipes