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Meat Gravies and Sauces

A method for making gravies and sauces from meat, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Meat Gravies and Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat

  1. Fry enough meat for your party, leaving some in the pan for gravy.

  2. Gash or mince the leftover meat.

  3. Cook out the juice without scorching.

  4. Discard the refuse meat.

Make the gravy

  1. Add a thickening prepared in advance.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Thin to desired consistency with boiling water.

Prepare the thickening

  1. Mix cold milk, water, or broth into flour until smooth.

Clarify the butter

  1. Melt ½ lb of butter slowly.

  2. Skim the butter.

  3. Let the butter settle.

  4. Pour off the curd.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Meat + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,703 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Meat
Browned meat and its drippings supply the savory flavor base of the gravy.
Flour
Starch in the flour thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the gravy body.
Butter
Fat adds richness and a rounded flavor to the gravy.

The step that matters

Cook out the juice without scorching. Cooking the juices drives off water and concentrates flavor. If the pan scorches, the browned bits turn bitter and burnt, and that taste carries into the whole 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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