Nail soup anyone?

Stretching stock - when thrift becomes obsession. Bibi van der Zee discovers remouillage

T-bone steak
Forget the steak, I'll just take the bones please. Photograph: Michel Lipchitz/AP

A hobo knocks on the door of a famously miserly old woman and asks if he can stay for the night, promising in return to make her the most wonderful soup she has ever tasted, all from (he holds it aloft) an old nail. She lets him in and he heats up water, then says that of course the soup would be much better if we added an onion? She is so curious that she agrees and hands over an onion. And a couple of carrots. And a potato, and a handful of herbs, and a whole chicken, and a sprinkling of salt. Finally the hobo drops in the nail, stirs the soup and declares it done. He gives her a bowl, she takes a sip and gasps. "That's amazing," she exclaims, "to make such a wonderful soup from one old nail!"

Is remouillage another kind of nail soup? I was reading a cookbook recently and noticed that the writer suggested keeping the chicken bones from a chicken soup in order to make stock. Now, I am a fanatical stock maker and always have been, even doing that embarrassing thing of asking for extra carcasses at the butcher (mu-um!) but I've never heard of this sort of thing. Shurely shome mishtake? If you've boiled bones once how can you get any goodness by boiling them again?

To me stock is the bones left over from a roast (or some roasted-off bones), dumped in water with celery, carrots, lots of onions, and whatever else you can dig out of the bottom of your fridge. I make it whenever we have the goods, and have to make myself actually use it instead of hoarding the stuff in a miserly way at the back of the freezer, just in case… (Of floods? The nuclear winter? A coup d'etat by Jeremy Clarkson? I'm not sure what eventuality I am anticipating here. But other freezer hoarders will know the feeling).

Naturally the idea that you can get two lots of stock for the price of one is appealing, but I can't believe that it will actually have any flavour. I've looked it up though, and it really does happen. It's known as remouillage (the name alone is enough to convert me), which is derived from the French for re-wetting: the procedure seems to be that you make your first stock, drain the fluid and set it aside, and then pour another batch of water onto the bones and begin from the beginning.

So I tried it out earlier this week: I'd stewed a rabbit for a couple of hours in order to make Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's ragu, and then shredded the meat off. There was this lovely pile of bones: I stuck them into a pot, added a couple of onions, a carrot, some celery, a bay leaf and some peppercorns, and left them to bubble away for a couple of hours (some of the internet guides to remouillage suggest four hours, but I needed to get to bed at some point). I thought I might end up, if nothing else, with a handy vegetable stock (or the aforementioned nail soup). But actually the result was a really lovely light meaty broth which would make a great base for a soup. In the end I reduced it a tonne and added it to the first lot of leftover stock, which seems to be what most people do with remouillage (oh, that word!). And so, my obsession with stock takes another step into the darklands … has anyone else tried this?