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To Make Gravy for a Turkey or Fowl

A savory gravy made by browning beef, simmering with herbs, spices, carrot, bread, and water, then seasoning and straining.

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 ↓

To Make Gravy for a Turkey or Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the beef and coat it with flour.

  2. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  3. Add the beef and brown it on all sides.

Make the gravy

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

  2. Cover and boil until reduced to about 1 pint.

  3. Season with salt and strain before serving.

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 meat flavour and body to the stock as it simmers and reduces.
Flour
Coats the beef and thickens the liquid as it cooks.
Butter
Fat for browning the beef, adding richness and savoury flavour.
Toasted bread
Adds toasty aroma and helps give the gravy body.

The step that matters

Brown the beef on all sides. Browning triggers the Maillard reaction, creating deep savoury flavour compounds. Pale meat added to boiling water produces a flatter, greyer-tasting gravy.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, egg, 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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