Court stock is a light-flavored liquid used for poaching fish, eggs, and chicken. It’s made with lemon juice, water, fresh herbs, and sometimes vegetables, and takes about 30 minutes to prepare. Bouillon cubes are not a good substitute. It can also be used to cook rice, potatoes, or couscous.
Court stock roughly translates to short boil and refers to a flavored liquid that is used for poaching things like fish, eggs, and sometimes even chicken. It’s sometimes called broth, but it has a very light flavor for broth and doesn’t require the significant cooking time of vegetable or meat broths. Instead, field stock takes about thirty minutes to prepare before using in recipes.
Most types of field stock use a little lemon juice, water, fresh herbs, and the occasional carrot, onion, and/or celery to give the poached stock a light flavor. This flavor helps flavor meat, fish, or eggs as they poach, but isn’t overpowering. All ingredients are usually added to the liquid and simmered for half an hour. Sometimes recipes recommend sautéing the vegetables in a little light oil first.
When you’re ready to use the court stock to poach, you usually do it first, as this will remove the herb leaves and any greens. These tend to be overcooked when making light broth, so they’re not usually worth the consumption. Alternatively, you can simply blanch meat, fish or eggs in unbound field broth. It’s a little trickier to do this when you’re egg hunting, as they’ll tend to pick up some herbs from the broth. If you want very clean egg whites, strain the broth first.
You’ll find a number of fish recipes that recommend poaching fish in court stock, but if you don’t have time for that, you can use vegetable or fish stock instead. Just remember that most stocks tend to be saltier than court stock. Look for low-salt stocks or broths.
The bouillon cubes you can buy in stores tend not to substitute well for freshly brewed camp style. They are very salty and often contain quite a few preservatives, many of which contain MSG. Such cubes can overwhelm delicate fish types and tend to overwhelm the fresh, natural taste of poached eggs.
In addition to using court broth for poaching, you can also cook rice, potatoes or couscous in the broth. These will add some extra flair to these rather simple flavored dishes. Because the flavor is light, it can be easily combined with other sauces or gravies without overwhelming the taste buds.
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