Ham Stock from a Gammon Bone

There's a quiet moment the morning after you've boiled a gammon. The kitchen still smells faintly of smoke and sweetness. The meat has been carved, some of it eaten, the rest wrapped and pushed to the back of the fridge. And on the hob, in a big pot, sits the cooking liquor with the bone half-submerged in it, looking like nothing much. This is where most people make their only mistake of the evening. They pour it away.

Don't. This liquor is the closest thing home cooking has to gold. Amber, smoky, deeply savoury, already seasoned for you by the gammon itself, it wants nothing more than an hour or two of gentle attention to become the best stock you've made in a long time. Drop the bone back in. Add an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf. Let it simmer. That's the whole recipe.

The finished stock has one obvious destination: pea and ham soup, thick and green and tasting of winter. But it makes a lentil soup sing, it turns a pot of white beans into something worth sitting down for, and a mugful with a knob of butter and a grating of pepper is a quiet, salty comfort on a cold afternoon when you haven't worked out what to eat yet. I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: 'Boxing Day stock. Never throw it away.' I still think that's one of the more useful sentences in there.

One warning. Don't salt it. Ever. The gammon has already done that for you, in quantities you didn't agree to. Taste as you go and remember that this is a stock that wants to be diluted into other things, not sipped neat.