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Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

A simple gravy made from a fowl neck simmered with water, salt, pepper, and optional spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy base

  1. Boil the neck of the fowl in ½ cup of water with salt, pepper, and any spices or herbs you prefer.

  2. Stew gently for 1 hour or more to avoid reducing too much.

Finish and serve

  1. When the fowl is ready, drain the fat from the dripping pan.

  2. Strain the liquid from the neck into the dripping pan and mix smoothly.

  3. Pass the gravy through a strainer again, heat it, and adjust seasoning if needed.

  4. Serve the gravy extremely hot.

  5. Baste the fowl with good butter and flour it when first placed over the fire.

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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl neck
Simmers into the liquid that becomes the gravy, giving it its meaty flavour and body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for basting, helping the fowl brown and gain flavour.

The step that matters

Stew gently rather than boiling hard. A gentle simmer for an hour or more extracts flavour from the neck slowly while limiting evaporation, so the liquid does not reduce too much and turn overly concentrated or salty.

“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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