How to Make a Stock Pot for Your Soups, Gravies, and Stews

A famous practical joke among chefs is to tell a young cook to make her soups and gravies out of "pipe stock." She's heard about stock and knows that no decent culinary artistry can be accomplished without a stock pot. But she’s never heard of pipe stock.

While all the cooks, bakers and dishwashers are chuckling behind their hands she runs around the kitchen looking for a can of pipe stock, can't find any and is afraid to ask.

What is pipe stock?
Well, it is the liquid that comes out when you turn on the faucet. In other words, it is plain water. Pipe stock is used by madmen, assassins and others whose ambition is to destroy civilization. Cooks with a decent regard for their fellow man use a properly devised stock pot.

What is a stock pot? Why do chefs say they cannot do their work without a stock pot.
Let me tell you how I found out about stock pots. In 1951 as a young army private just out of cook school, I was assigned to work at the Officers Club at the Presidio in San Francisco. Army cooks would kill to get a cushy post like this. I fell into the job by accident. The joke was I didn't know how to cook beans, or anything else.

And I sure didn't know what a stock pot was.
All I knew was how to keep a mess hall clean, which was the main subject hammered into the minds of young cooks at the 6th Army Cooks & Bakers School. We were taught how to avoid poisoning the troops, that is, how to keep grease and flies out of the food.

To be sure we understood the importance of cleanliness, we were shown frightening movies about the horrors of disease caused by flies and how the trots had put an entire British Regiment out of action at Waterloo.

It was frightening to hear the announcer - in a cultivated British accent, no less - tell us in sickening detail how one cook's disregard of flies and grease nearly resulted in a disaster of massive proportions.