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Beef Gravy Sauce, or Brown Sauce for Ragouts, Game, Poultry, Fish, Etc.

A rich brown sauce made from beef, ham or bacon, onion, water, herbs, and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Beef Gravy Sauce, or Brown Sauce for Ragouts, Game, Poultry, Fish, Etc.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. In a thick, well-tinned stew pan, heat the fat ham or bacon, or butter with the onion.

  2. Add the gravy beef, cover, and cook on low heat until it begins to brown.

  3. Pour in the boiling water, bring to a boil, and skim off any scum.

  4. Add the toasted bread, herbs, lemon peel, allspice, and black pepper.

  5. Cover and let it simmer gently for about 2 hours.

  6. Strain the sauce through a sieve into a basin.

Thicken and finish

  1. For thickening, melt butter in a clean stew pan, gradually add flour, and mix well.

  2. Pour in a little of the gravy, stir, and then add the rest gradually.

  3. Simmer for 15-20 minutes, skimming off fat, until thick as cream.

  4. Strain through a fine sieve for a rich brown sauce.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Winter savory + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together863 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Winter savory + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together616 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Gravy beef
Provides the meat flavour and body that the finished sauce is built on.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and carries the flavour of the browned base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked into melted butter and combined with the gravy.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aromatic depth as it cooks with the fat.
Toasted bread
Adds body and helps thicken the liquid as it simmers.

The step that matters

Adding the gravy to the roux gradually. Adding the liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour smoothly dispersed, preventing lumps and giving an even, thick sauce.

“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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