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Gravies and Sauces

A gravy made from bones, onion, butter, flour, and seasonings, finished with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Gravies and Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Slice the onion and fry it in butter over high heat for 2 minutes until it colors slightly.

  2. Stir in enough flour to form a stiff paste.

  3. Gradually mix in the gravy made from bones and let it boil gently for 15 minutes until thick like cream.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve into a basin and return it to the stewpan.

Season and serve

  1. Season with pickled onions, walnuts, gherkins, mushroom catsup, ale, shallot, or tarragon vinegar as desired.

  2. Cover the bottom of the dish with toasted bread snippets cut into triangles.

  3. Garnish with fried bread snippets.

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. Shallot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Walnut + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, adding savory depth to the gravy base.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavor while helping the onion brown slightly.
Flour
Thickens the gravy into a smooth, stiff paste that gives body when liquid is added.
Gravy made from bones
Provides the main liquid and meaty flavor that the sauce is built on.
Mushroom catsup
Adds concentrated savory, umami flavor to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually mix in the gravy made from bones. Adding the liquid slowly to the flour paste lets it blend smoothly; adding it all at once can leave lumps that a sieve must then remove.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, walnut, mushroom, shallot, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, walnut, mushroom, shallot, tarragon, vinegar. 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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