Skip to main content
Main

The Gravy

A savory gravy made from boiled giblets, port wine, sherry, lemon, cayenne, thickened with arrowroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Port wine and sherry match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

The Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil 8 quarts of water.

  2. Scald the giblets in boiling water.

  3. Cut the giblets into joints.

  4. Add the giblets to the stock.

  5. Simmer gently until tender.

  6. Strain the gravy through a cloth.

  7. Skim off the grease.

Finish the gravy

  1. Put the gravy into a clean pot with the giblets.

  2. Thicken the gravy with arrowroot dissolved in cold water, but do not make it too thick.

  3. Finish by adding ½ pint of sherry, juice of ½ lemon, and 2 grains of cayenne.

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. Port wine + sherrytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Arrowroot + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together129 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Port wine + lemontop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce when dissolved in cold water and heated.
Port wine
Adds depth, sweetness and aroma to the gravy.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the finished gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavour of the gravy.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy without overdoing it. Arrowroot thickens strongly when heated and cools to a gel, so adding too much makes the gravy gluey. Dissolving it in cold water first prevents lumps, and the gravy should be kept only as thick as the record asks.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, arrowroot, sherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, arrowroot, sherry. 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 giblet gravy recipes

Turkey 3 See all 12 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesArrowroot GruelArrowroot Gruel37 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes