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Pork Flour-gravy

A pork gravy made with flour, butter, water, milk, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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

Make the gravy base

  1. Fry the pork in a frying pan.

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

  3. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of flour over the bottom of the pan and let it brown thoroughly.

  4. Pour in 1 pint of boiling water.

Finish and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix 1 heaping tablespoon of flour with 1 cup of sweet milk.

  2. Stir the milk mixture into the boiling water.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and add a small piece of butter.

  4. Cook well and serve.

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

Pork
Provides the meat flavour and fat that the gravy is built on.
Flour
Browns in the pan fat and then thickens the liquid into a gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the pan and the finished gravy.
Sweet milk
Adds creaminess and mild sweetness to the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the pan. Flour must be cooked in hot fat until it turns golden brown, which gives the gravy its colour and nutty flavour and removes raw starch taste. Stirring it into liquid too early leaves lumps and a pale, floury gravy.

“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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