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Nut Gravy No. J

A simple nut-based gravy made with water, nut butter, browned flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Nut Gravy No. J

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the thickener

  1. In a small bowl, mix a little boiling water with the nut butter until smooth.

  2. In another bowl, mix the browned flour with a little cold water until smooth.

Make the gravy

  1. Heat the water in a pot until boiling.

  2. Add the nut butter mixture to the boiling water.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the pot and stir well.

  4. Season with salt and let it boil for a few minutes.

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

Nut butter
Adds body, richness and a nutty flavour to the liquid.
Browned flour
Thickens the liquid and adds a toasted, savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the boiling liquid. Flour thickens best when it is smoothed in cold or warm liquid first and then stirred into hot liquid. Adding it lumpy or dry causes clumps that are hard to smooth out, so stir well as it goes in.

“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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