Skip to main content
Main

Common Gravy

A hearty beef gravy made with suet, onions, carrots, celery, cloves, mace, peppercorns, and broth simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Common Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pot

  1. Spread butter on the bottom of a medium-sized stewpan.

  2. Cover with thin slices of beef suet and add slices of onions.

  3. Layer in the beef and any meat trimmings.

Simmer

  1. Moisten with 1 quart of common broth and bring to a boil over high heat.

  2. Once reduced to a glaze, reduce heat and cover with ashes to simmer.

  3. Add carrots, celery, cloves, mace, and peppercorns.

  4. If using water, add 1 teaspoon of salt.

  5. Bring to a boil, skim thoroughly, then reduce heat and simmer for about 3 hours.

  6. Strain the gravy through a fine sieve.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds fat that enriches the gravy and carries flavor during the long cooking.
Gravy beef
Releases gelatin and savory flavor into the broth during slow simmering.
Common broth
Forms the liquid base that extracts flavor from the meat and vegetables.
Carrots
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the simmering liquid.
Celery
Adds savory, aromatic background flavor to the gravy.

The step that matters

Skim thoroughly after the first boil. Foam and fat that rise during the initial boil can cloud the gravy and taste greasy. Removing them before the long simmer keeps the final gravy clear and clean-flavored.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, beef, onion, meat, carrot, celery, clove):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, beef, onion, meat, carrot, celery, clove. 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.

More beef gravy recipes

Soup 28Rich 9Roast 5Clear 4Sauce 3 See all 96 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes