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A Good Beef Gravy for Poultry, Game, &C.

A savory beef gravy made by simmering beef, water, shallot, salt, pepper, and Harvey's sauce, thickened with arrowroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Good Beef Gravy for Poultry, Game, &C.

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the beef into small pieces and place it in a stewpan with the cold water.

  2. Add the shallot, salt, and pepper, then simmer gently for 3 hours without boiling fast.

  3. Before serving, mix the arrowroot with a little cold water and pour it into the gravy while stirring.

  4. Add the Harvey's sauce and let it come to a boil.

  5. Strain the gravy into a tureen and serve very hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Shallot + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pepper + arrowroottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together329 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Shallot + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the meat flavour and body that the gravy is built from.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, glossy gravy as it heats.
Shallot or small onion
Adds savoury, aromatic sweetness to the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot slurry. Arrowroot must be mixed with cold water first and stirred into the hot gravy, or it clumps. It thickens when heated, so the gravy should be simmering while stirred and not boiled hard for long afterward.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, shallot, pepper, sauce):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, shallot, pepper, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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