Our favorite winter proverb around here is “When life hands you cold, make something hot in the kitchen.” A cake or pie is always nice baking in the oven, but to really warm the house up on a miserable morning my hands-down favorite strategy is to make stock. Simmering on top of the stove for most of the day, the magical pot produces humidity, fragrance and the promise of a delicious soup or sauce when all of the flavor is at last distilled.

I never even considered making my own stock until last year. City girl that I am, I viewed bouillon cubes and stock as interchangeable until I was faced with a big pile of blocky, white-wrapped “Soup Bones” that came back from the butcher with the first steer we raised here on the farm. With my new-found old-fashioned country values and the knowledge that this meat had taken us 18 months to grow, including four freezing months that required no small amount of work hauling hay and breaking water, I didn’t want anything to go to waste! And so my adventures in stock-making began.

I first solicited the help of some good foodie friends to get me started. Folks who make stock tend to swear by stock and these friends were no exception, extolling both the taste as exceptional and the health benefits as tremendous. According to nutritionist and holistic food activist Sally Fallon, “A cure-all in traditional households and the magic ingredient in classic gourmet cuisine, stock or broth made from bones of chicken, fish and beef builds strong bones, assuages sore throats, nurtures the sick, puts vigor in the step and sparkle in love life—so say grandmothers, midwives and healers. For chefs, stock is the magic elixir for making soul-warming soups and matchless sauces.”

“Good broth will resurrect the dead,” says a South American proverb, and even here in modern America we still crave chicken soup when stuck in bed with a cold. Made from cooking down bones and meat scraps in water for hours over low heat, stock is a remarkable concoction of many nutrients not normally available to us in our food. According to Fallon, “Stock contains minerals in a form the body can absorb easily—not just calcium but also magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, sulphur and trace minerals. It contains the broken down material from cartilage and tendons—stuff like chondroitin sulphates and glucosamine, now sold as expensive supplements for arthritis and joint pain.” Stock is also rich in gelatin, which contains the amino acids arginine and glycine in large amounts and acts to conserve protein in the body. Research has also shown gelatin to aid digestion and to be useful in the treatment of peptic ulcers, tuberculosis, diabetes, muscle diseases, infectious diseases, jaundice and cancer.

Pretty compelling praise for a soup base made of some quite homely leftovers. But where it’s at for me with stock is in the flavor. My first stock, made of those ungainly beef bones, was not my best. I cooked it for about three days out on my garage summer kitchen stove, having great trouble maintaining a simmer. I also forgot to skim the scum off. Yikes! Still, that broth tasted fabulous and the first barley stew I made from it was the best soup I’d ever tasted. Since then, I’ve learned to love stock of all kinds, though my absolute favorite is goose stock, which is fortuitous, since the free-range geese we harvest from our farm are so lean they hardly give us any meat.

Classic cookbooks are pretty unanimous in their praise of stock. Said Escoffier: “Indeed, stock is everything in cooking. Without it, nothing can be done.” In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, Julia Child attests: “The wonderful flavor of good French food is the result, more often than not, of the stock used for its cooking, its flavoring, its sauce.”

Almost any bones, carcasses and vegetable scraps are suitable for making stock, and Julia reassures the home cook, “Unless you intend to make the stock for an absolutely remarkable consomme, use what you have on hand and add any fresh ingredients you wish to buy. It is a good idea to make a collection in the freezer of beef, veal, and poultry bones, and meat scraps. Then when a sufficient amount has accumulated, you can boil up a stock. Both meat and bones give flavor, and the bones, in addition, contain a certain amount of gelatin which gives body to the stock.” Of course, you don’t really BOIL (more on that in the next post) a stock and Julia follows that laisse-fair prescription with several pages of very specific ingredients for very specific stocks. But the main technique is basically to cover some left-over meat bones with water and simmer for a long time. Check back soon for a break-down of how to make this humble ambrosia. We’ve still got lots of cold days left this winter for experimenting.