Time to take stock

I spent some of the happiest holidays of my childhood in my grandmother’s Colonial house in the green hills of the Hudson River Valley, and on grey winter days my mind often goes back to the snug country kitchen where, with her usual Yankee thrift, she used to make her famous soups even more delicious with the special stocks she kept in huge glass candy jars with tight-fitting lids. She had two, I remember, one for beef stock and the other for a mixture of chicken and veal. She used to make the stocks from trimmings and scraps of meat for which she had no other use, and from the extra bones she always made a point of asking the butcher to give her with each order. These she would slowly simmer in a large stockpot on the back of her wood-burning range with a few carrots and onions, a leek or two and some pot herbs, until all the flavours were extracted. The beef stock was used for soups such as oxtail, pot-au-feu, or black bean, and for her more highly flavoured sauces. The chicken and veal stock she always used as part of the liquid in cream soups (no wine used in cooking for that household) and to enrich white sauces for eggs, chicken or vegetable dishes.