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Gravy for Rump Steaks

A creamy gravy made with pan fat, butter, flour, water, ketchup, pepper, salt, and optional parsley or horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Gravy for Rump Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Pour the fat out of the pan.

  2. Dredge the pan with flour and let it brown slightly.

  3. Add the butter and mix it with the flour in the pan until well combined.

  4. When it is a little brown, gradually mix in the boiling water until the sauce thickens to the consistency of cream.

  5. Stir in the ketchup, pepper, and salt to taste, and keep stirring until the sauce boils for 1-2 minutes.

  6. Pour the gravy over the steaks through a sieve.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish the steaks with parsley or scraped horseradish if desired.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Ketchup + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it browns with the fat and butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that blends with the flour to form a roux.
Boiling water
Loosens the roux into a smooth liquid that thickens as it cooks.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity, deepening the gravy's flavour.

The step that matters

Keep stirring after the boil. Once the sauce is thickening, stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed so lumps do not form, and boiling for 1-2 minutes fully cooks the starch so the gravy thickens properly and loses its raw flour taste.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, ketchup, pepper, horseradish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, ketchup, pepper, horseradish. 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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