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Sauce

Gravy for Game

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, stock, mustard, spices, lemon juice, and sherry, simmered and served over game.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Gravy for Game

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix in the flour until smooth and lightly browned.

  3. Add the stock, mustard, cayenne, mace, and lemon juice.

  4. Boil for 20 minutes.

  5. Stir in the sherry and serve in a tureen.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 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

Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the gravy with fat, giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the butter into a roux.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that the thickened roux is dissolved into.
Sherry
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth added at the end, just before serving.

The step that matters

Mix in the flour until smooth and lightly browned. Cooking the flour in melted butter gelatinises its starch and toasts it slightly. If it is not stirred constantly and cooked enough, the gravy can taste raw or form lumps when the stock is added.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mustard, pepper, lemon, sherry):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mustard, pepper, lemon, sherry. 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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