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Sauce

To Make Gravy

A gravy made by browning beef, veal, and mutton and adding water to achieve a sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mutton are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Make Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the meat into small pieces.

  2. In a large deep saucepan, layer the beef at the bottom. Add the veal and mutton on top.

Cook

  1. Cover the saucepan and cook until the meat is well browned.

  2. Add water as needed to create a gravy consistency.

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. Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

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

  2. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Veal + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Browns to build savory flavour and body in the gravy.
Veal
Adds mild meaty flavour and gelatin-rich body as it cooks.
Mutton
Adds richer, more distinct meat flavour and fat to the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the meat. Browning depends on direct, dry heat at the meat's surface, which creates savory flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pieces or covering the pan traps steam, which keeps the surface wet and slows browning.

“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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