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Gravy, Brown, Roux for Thickening

A brown roux made by slowly melting butter and adding flour to thicken gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Gravy, Brown, Roux for Thickening

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter slowly in a clean saucepan.

  2. Gradually add the flour, shaking it in from a dredging box.

  3. Stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth and a bright brown color.

  4. Press the spoon against the bottom of the saucepan to prevent burning.

Store

  1. Store in jars for later use, keeping the surface intact.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Fresh butter
Melts to form the fat base that coats the flour and carries flavor.
Flour
Thickens the fat when cooked, providing the structure for sauces and gravies.

The step that matters

Stirring the roux as it browns. Flour scorches easily on the hot pan bottom, and scorched flour gives a bitter taste. Keeping the mixture moving and pressing the spoon along the bottom spreads heat evenly and lets the flour brown gradually.

“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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