Skip to main content
Main

Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

A simple gravy made by simmering a fowl neck in water with salt and pepper, then straining and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Boil the neck of the fowl in ½ pint of water with salt, pepper, and any spices or herbs you prefer.

  2. Stew gently for 1 hour or more to avoid reducing too much.

Finish the gravy

  1. When the fowl is ready, drain the fat from the dripping pan.

  2. Strain the liquid from the neck into the pan and mix smoothly.

  3. Heat the gravy, adding more salt and pepper or cayenne if needed, and serve hot.

Baste the fowl

  1. Baste the fowl with good butter and flour it when first placed over the fire.

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Neck of fowl
Simmered in water to make the stock that gives the gravy its body and flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the fowl brown and taste savoury while basting.

The step that matters

Stew gently. A hard boil drives off water quickly and concentrates the liquid too far, making the gravy salty and thick. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the neck slowly while keeping enough liquid for the 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes