Skip to main content
Main

Gravy for Turkey, Fowl, or Ragoo

A savory beef gravy for turkey, fowl, or ragoo made with flour, butter, herbs, spices, and boiled water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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, Fowl, or Ragoo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut and hack the beef well, then coat it in flour.

  2. Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

Make the gravy

  1. Add the beef and fry it on all sides until slightly browned.

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

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

  4. Season with coarse sea 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 the meat flavour that forms the base of the gravy.
Flour
Coats the beef and thickens the liquid as it cooks.
Butter
Carries the frying of the beef and adds richness and browning.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid that extracts flavour from the beef and aromatics.

The step that matters

Frying the beef until slightly browned. Browning the flour-coated beef builds deeper savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale frying gives a flatter gravy, so the surfaces need real colour before the water goes in.

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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes