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Plain Household Gravy

A simple gravy made from bacon bones, onions, turnip, and water or stock, thickened with flour and seasoned with Worcestershire sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Plain Household Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Fry the bones in a pan until lightly browned.

  2. Fry the sliced onions until brown.

  3. Add the onions, bones, turnip, and water or stock to a pot.

  4. Simmer for 1½ hours.

  5. Strain the mixture to remove fat.

Thicken and flavor

  1. To thicken, mix 1 teaspoon of flour with ½ pint of gravy.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pan used for the cutlets and stir over heat until thickened.

  3. Add Worcestershire Sauce or other flavoring as desired.

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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 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

Bones
Release browned meat flavor and body into the gravy as they simmer.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth when browned before simmering.
Flour
Thickens the strained liquid into a gravy as it heats.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, flour, sauce):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, flour, 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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