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To Make Gravy Without Meat

A savory gravy made from onions, water, beer, and seasonings, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Make Gravy Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the onions and fry them in a little brown butter.

Make the gravy

  1. Add water, beer, coarse sea salt, fine lemon peel, pepper, ketchup, sweet herbs, and toasted bread.

  2. Simmer in a saucepan for 20 minutes.

  3. Skim off the fat and strain the gravy.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Beer + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together680 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Fried in butter, they build a sweet, savoury base that flavours the liquid.
Beer
Adds malty, slightly bitter depth to the liquid as it simmers.
Toasted bread
Its toasted starch helps thicken the gravy and adds a roasted flavour.
Brown butter
Adds nutty aroma and richness to the onions as they fry.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, beer, pepper, ketchup, bread, butter):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Grapefits about as well
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, beer, pepper, ketchup, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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