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Pork Flour-gravy

Pork cooked with a flour, butter, and milk gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Pork Flour-gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Fry the pork

  1. Fry the pork in a frying pan.

  2. Add butter to the pan and heat until very hot.

  3. Sprinkle flour over the bottom of the pan and let it brown thoroughly.

Make the gravy

  1. Pour in boiling water (about 1 pint).

  2. Mix heaping tablespoon of flour with sweet milk and stir into the boiling water.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, add a small piece of butter, and cook well.

  4. Serve hot.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

Flour
Browns in the pan fat and then thickens the liquid into a smooth gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for frying and richness to the finished gravy.
Sweet milk
Adds body and creaminess to the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot fat until it turns golden brown; this toasts the starch and builds flavour. Stirring in the liquid too early leaves a raw, pasty taste and lumps.

“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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