Читать книгу The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - Richard Olney - Страница 27

A pure veal stock, properly executed, is the only impeccable, all-round basic stock. Ideally, a braising liquid or a sauce base should be an essence of the basic element in the preparation (woodcock glaze for woodcocks, venison stock for venison, etc.), but this leads us into theoretical cooking, for only past royalty was able to permit itself such luxury. A Beef Stock (pot-au-feu) remains the best braising stock for beef, and its full-bodied flavor, less marked in personality than that of furred game, renders it satisfactory as a braising liquid for the latter. By the same token, chicken stock may be used in certain preparations of feathered game. Only veal stock, by virtue of the essentially anonymous character of the meat, can lend body and support to all other flavors without altering their basic personalities. It is a solid vehicle and catalyst that is never self-assertive. It serves also as a base for other stocks for, although one may not be able to sacrifice several pheasants to the preparation of an essence for one pheasant salmis, one may very easily enrich a veal stock by the addi-tion of leftover carcasses (or heads, necks, giblets) from roast birds. The many recipes for braised vegetables may be properly made only with veal stock. Covered, it may be kept indefinitely in the refrigerator if one is careful to boil it every few days and transfer it to a clean container. I have never tried freezing it but see no reason why it should suffer from this treatment.

The specific quantities of ingredients, although given, are of no importance. The important thing is that the result be as concentrated in aromatic essence as possible. For this reason, anything that takes up room in the stock pot without lending flavor should be eliminated—bones, in particular, with the exception of veal hock, which gives readily of its gelatin. For bones to be serviceable, one must make, first, a stock of bones which is allowed to cook for a good eight to ten hours, then use this liquid for moistening the veal.

A veal stock that is moistened with another veal stock rather than water is, naturally, that much finer. A veal half-glaze (demi-glace de veau) is clear veal stock reduced to a light syrupy consistency. A veal glaze (glace de veau) is the half-glaze reduced (with regular changes to smaller saucepans) to its ultimate intensity. Although valuable, even essential, for certain preparations, these refinements, because of the time and expense involved, do not occur in the recipes in this book.