Taking stock

Don’t emulate Macbeth’s witches by boiling stock to death, advises Tom Parker Bowles–slow, low and steady always wins the taste race

- Tom Parker Bowles

DOUBLE, double toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’ Shakespeare’s witches may have been a dab hand at nefarious potions, but their stock-making skills were dire. The true art, as any self-respecting, Hecate-hailing hag should know, is all about the blip, blip, rather than the bubble, bubble. Low and slow, rather than hell’s ablazin’.

They’re not alone in their ignorance. Like the creation of mayonnaise and soufflés, stock-making inspires a similar awe and fear as those three wizened crones, seemingly complex procedures that combine dark culinary sorcery with brutally learned technique. Something to be left to the professionals and the dark, clanking inferno of the brute commercial kitchen.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Because this is a process as soothing as it is satisfying, one that takes leftovers, mainly unloved, and transforms them into the very essence of savoury delight. A few bones, gently cooked so the flavour —and collagen—is softly coaxed out. Plus a few essential ingredients. Carrots, tomatoes and onions for a wonderfully subtle sweetness. Celery for its mysterious, sensually rounded allure. Bay, both essentially English and quintessentially Mediterranean. Parsley stalks for ethereal verdancy and peppercorns for that whisper of heat. In short, the creation of something divine, out of the very basest of ingredients.