Made-Over Dishes/Stock

STOCK

In all good cooking there is a constant demand for a half pint or a pint of stock. Brown sauce and tomato sauce, in fact, all meat sauces, are decidedly better made from stock than water, and as it comes to every household without the additional cost of a penny, there is no excuse whatever for being without it. Save the bones collected on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Chicken and veal bones may be kept together; beef, mutton and ham in another lot; one makes a white stock, the other brown. If the quantity is small, put them all together. Crack the bones, put them in the bottom of a large soup kettle, cover with cold water, bring slowly to boiling point and skim. Push the kettle to the back part of the stove, where the stock may simmer for at least three hours, then add an onion into which you have stuck twelve cloves, a bay leaf, a few celery tops, or a little celery seed, and a carrot cut into slices; simmer gently for another hour and strain. Tuesdays and Saturdays are the best days for making stock, as they are the days on which you have long, continuous fires; Tuesdays for ironing purposes; Saturdays for bread baking; in this way you will economize in coal, heat and time.

In making tomato soup, to each pint of tomatoes add a pint of this stock instead of water; or the stock may be simply heated, nicely seasoned and used as clear soup. By adding a little cooked rice or macaroni, you will have a rice or a macaroni soup.

In cream soups, where stock takes the place of water, less milk gives equal, perhaps better, results. For instance, in cream of celery soup, cover the celery with cold stock instead of water, using a quart instead of a pint of water, and then use only a pint of milk, having in the end the same quantity of a much more tasty soup at a less cost. One soon learns that all made-over dishes are more savory where stock is used in place of water. If peas, beans or cabbage are being cooked, this water may be added to that in which beef or mutton has been boiled, the whole reduced carefully by rapid boiling, strained and put aside for use.