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Cullis, or Brown Gravy

A brown gravy made by browning veal and gammon with onions, herbs, and spices, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Cullis, or Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Layer the bottom of a stew pan with lean veal, about 1 inch thick.

  2. Cover the veal with thin slices of gammon, onions, bay leaves, sweet herbs, mace, and cloves.

  3. Cover the pan and set it over a slow fire.

  4. Increase the heat slightly when juices begin to release.

Make the gravy

  1. Once the meat is browned, fill the pan with beef broth, boil, and skim.

  2. Simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Mix water with flour to thicken, then add to the pan.

  4. Boil for 30 minutes and strain the mixture.

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Veal + beeftop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

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

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 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

Lean veal
Provides the meat flavour and body that the broth is built on.
Beef broth
Forms the liquid base of the gravy and carries the flavour of the meat and aromatics.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a gravy with a smooth, coating texture.
Onions
Add sweetness and depth as they cook down with the meat.

The step that matters

Browning the meat before adding broth. Slow heat lets juices release and the meat brown gradually; browned surfaces build the deep, savoury colour and flavour the gravy depends on. Adding broth too early steams the meat and yields a pale, flat gravy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, onion, clove, beef, flour):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, onion, clove, beef, flour. 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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