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A Gravy Without Meat

A savory gravy made with beer, water, spices, onion, and walnut pickle, cooked without meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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A Gravy Without Meat

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Gravy Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine small beer, water, pepper, salt, grated lemon peel, bruised cloves, and walnut pickle in a basin.

  2. Slice the onion.

  3. Coat the sliced onion in flour.

  4. Fry the coated onion in butter until brown.

Make the gravy

  1. Add the fried onion to the mixture in the basin.

  2. Cover the basin.

  3. Let the gravy simmer for 20 minutes.

  4. Strain the gravy.

  5. Let the gravy cool.

  6. Remove the fat from the gravy.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Provides the main body and savoury sweetness as it browns in butter and flavours the liquid.
Butter
Fat that carries the browning of the floured onion and adds richness to the gravy.
Flour
Coats the onion so it browns evenly and helps thicken the gravy as it cooks.
Small beer
Liquid base that adds malty, slightly acidic depth as it simmers with the onion.
Walnut pickle
Contributes a strong, tangy, savoury flavour that deepens the gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the coated onion in butter until brown. Browning the floured onion builds deep, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale onion gives a flat gravy, while over-darkened onion turns bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beer, pepper, lemon, clove, walnut, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, pepper, lemon, clove, walnut, butter, 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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