Taking stock: waste nothing!

Faced with a pile of vegetable peelings, shelled pea and bean pods and stems from bolted onions, what would you do? I hope the answer would be to turn them into vegetable stock. There is a great deal of nutritional content in this waste and it should be extracted rather than thrown away. So, yesterday, in our antique brass preserving pan, I put a pile of waste, added some bay leaves and boiled it all up. The result is a dark vegetable stock which tomorrow will be used to make soup.

I'm also looking for medieval pottage recipes and my guess is that they will contain stock as well. I have a talk to do on medieval foods in October to our local history society so I will be trying out a number of ancient recipes over the next few weeks. Of course, back in the medieval period, no food was ever wasted, sadly, unlike today when huge amounts are thrown away.