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Common Stock

A savory broth made by simmering meat bones, trimmings, and vegetables with herbs and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Common Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine bones, giblets, and trimmings in a large pot.

  2. Add sweet herbs, onions, parsley, carrots, celery, salt, and pepper.

  3. Pour in enough water to cover the ingredients and bring to a boil.

  4. Reduce heat and let it simmer for several hours to extract flavors.

Make the roux and thicken

  1. For thickening, melt 2 ounces of butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Gradually add 2.5 ounces of flour, stirring until smooth and velvety.

  3. Cook the roux slowly until it turns a biscuit brown for brown soups, or keep it white for white soups.

  4. Add the roux to the stock and stir well to combine.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bones of cooked meat
Release gelatin and savory flavor into the water during long simmering.
Giblets
Add concentrated meaty flavor to the stock.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and aromatic depth as they cook down.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stock.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory background flavor to the stock.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the stock when cooked with butter into a roux.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux slowly. Flour must be cooked long enough to remove its raw starchy taste and to reach the intended colour. Too much heat browns or scorches the roux unevenly, giving a bitter taste, while too little leaves it pasty and floury.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, turkey, beef, parsley, carrot, celery, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, turkey, beef, parsley, carrot, celery, pepper. 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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