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To Draw Plain Gravy

A simple gravy made by simmering beef with water and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Draw Plain Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Notch and flour the beef.

  2. Place it in a pot with cold water.

  3. Skim carefully and simmer gently until all the juice is extracted.

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. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Gravy beef or ox melt
Provides the meat and connective tissue that release juice and body into the liquid as it simmers.
Flour
Coats the beef so its surface can brown and helps thicken the juices into a gravy.

The step that matters

Skim carefully and simmer gently. Scum and fat rise to the surface as the beef heats. Gentle simmering keeps the liquid clear and prevents the proteins from breaking up and clouding the gravy.

“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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