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Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

A simple gravy made from a boiled fowl neck, reduced broth, and butter, served with roasted fowl.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Cut the neck of the fowl into small pieces and boil it in ½ pint of water with a little salt, pepper, and any herbs or spices you prefer.

  2. Simmer gently for at least 1 hour until the liquid reduces.

Make the gravy

  1. Drain the fat from the dripping pan and strain the liquid from the neck into it.

  2. Heat the mixture, adding more salt and pepper or cayenne if needed, and serve hot.

Roast the fowl

  1. Baste the fowl with butter and dust it with flour before roasting.

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).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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
Adds fat and moisture to the surface and helps the skin brown as it roasts.
Flour
Dusted on the skin, it helps the surface brown and crisp during roasting.
Neck of a fowl
Simmered in water to release flavour and body into the gravy liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for at least 1 hour. Gentle simmering extracts flavour from the neck slowly and reduces the liquid without making the meat tough. A hard boil can toughen the meat and cloud the stock.

“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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