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Sauce

White Gravy Sauce

A veal and beef gravy thickened with white roux and flavored with carrots, onions, parsley, thyme, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

White Gravy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the veal and beef into pieces.

  2. Place the pieces in a stew pan with any meat trimmings.

  3. Moisten with broth or water.

  4. Add carrots, onions, parsley, thyme, and mushrooms.

  5. Heat the meat through without burning.

  6. Prick the meat to release juices.

Make the sauce

  1. Once cooked, remove the knuckle.

  2. Let the stew pan sit by the fire for a few minutes.

  3. Skim the fat off the sauce.

  4. Strain the sauce.

  5. Boil until reduced to desired quantity.

  6. Thicken with white roux.

  7. Boil again.

  8. Skim if necessary.

  9. Stir continuously to make the sauce smooth.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Knuckle of veal
Gives the stock body and rich meaty flavour as it cooks down.
Gravy beef
Adds deeper meaty flavour and gelatin-rich body to the stock.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock.
Onions
Contribute savoury sweetness and aroma that round out the sauce.
White roux
Thickens the sauce by starch gelatinising in the hot liquid, giving it body.
Chopped mushrooms
Add earthy umami flavour and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Skim the fat and stir while thickening. Fat left in the sauce separates and makes it greasy, while stirring the roux into hot liquid keeps starch evenly dispersed so the sauce stays smooth instead of lumpy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, beef, carrot, parsley, thyme, mushroom, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, beef, carrot, parsley, thyme, mushroom, butter. 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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