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Soup

Medium Stock

A long-simmered stock made from beef or veal, bacon or ham, bones, and vegetables, strained before storing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 into pieces about 3 inches square.

  2. Melt the butter in the bottom of a large pot.

Make the stock

  1. Add 1 pint of water and the meat, cover, and place on high heat, stirring occasionally.

  2. When the bottom of the pot is covered with a pale firm gravy, add 4 quarts of cold water and the other ingredients.

  3. Simmer for 3 hours, removing any scum that forms.

Strain

  1. Before storing, strain the stock through a fine 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-rich meat and bones that release gelatin, giving the stock body and a silky mouthfeel.
Butter
Fat that helps brown the meat at the start and carries flavour into the stock.
Lean bacon or ham
Cured meat that adds savoury depth and salty, smoky aroma to the stock.
Onions
Sweetness and aromatic depth as they cook slowly into the liquid.
Carrots
Natural sweetness that rounds out the savoury flavour of the stock.
Celery
Aromatic vegetable adding a fresh, herbal background note to the stock.

The step that matters

Browning the meat until a pale firm gravy forms. Only add the cold water once the bottom of the pot is covered with the gravy, since it means the meat has released and reduced its juices. Adding water too early stops the meat from developing a deeper flavour, and the stock may taste flat.

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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