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Gravy for Roast Meat

A simple gravy made from roast meat drippings, stock or water, optional caramel browning and Liebig’s Extract, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,777 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Gravy for Roast Meat

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Remove the roast meat and pour off all the fat from the drippings.

  2. Add a little stock or water to the sediment in the tin.

  3. Use an iron spoon to scrape off the browned meat juices.

  4. Add more stock or water to reach about 2 cups of gravy.

  5. If using water, add a little caramel browning and Liebig’s Extract if desired.

  6. Bring the gravy to a boil, season with salt and pepper, and strain.

Serve

  1. Pour some gravy around the joint and serve the rest in a gravy boat.

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. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Drippings from roast meat
Provide concentrated meat flavor and browned residue that gives the gravy its base taste and color.
Stock or water
Dissolves the browned sediment and provides the liquid that becomes the gravy.
Caramel browning
Adds a deeper brown color to the gravy.

The step that matters

Scraping up the browned meat juices. The browned bits stuck to the tin are concentrated flavor. Loosening them with liquid and scraping thoroughly lets them dissolve into the gravy, while leaving them behind leaves the gravy pale and flat.

“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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