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Gravy for Turkey, Fold, or Ragout

A savory gravy made from beef, butter, herbs, and spices, simmered with water and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Gravy for Turkey, Fold, or Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Flour the beef well.

Make the gravy

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the beef and fry until browned on all sides.

  3. Pour in the boiling water and add the sweet herbs, mace, cloves, peppercorns, carrot, and toasted bread.

  4. Cover and let it boil until reduced to about 1 pint.

  5. Season with salt 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. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides meaty flavour and body as it browns and simmers into the gravy.
All-purpose flour
Coats the beef and thickens the liquid while it cooks and browns.
Butter
Carries the browning of the beef and adds richness to the gravy.
Toasted bread crust
Adds toasted, roasted aroma and some body to the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Fry the beef until browned on all sides. Browning creates Maillard flavour compounds that give the gravy its deep, savoury taste. Pale beef yields a flatter, weaker-tasting gravy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, butter, clove, carrot, bread):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, butter, clove, carrot, bread. 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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