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Sauce

Gravy with Cream Sauce

A sauce made by combining butter, flour, and gravy, seasoned with nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Gravy with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute until lightly browned.

Finish the gravy

  1. Add the gravy, nutmeg, salt, and pepper, and simmer for 1-2 minutes.

  2. Serve with sippets or substitute with a cream 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. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries the flour so it can be cooked smoothly.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks in the butter to form a roux.
Good gravy
Provides the main liquid and savoury flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour briefly in the fat removes its raw, pasty taste and lets it thicken evenly. Stirring keeps it from scorching or forming lumps, and it should only brown lightly so the sauce stays pale.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits about as well
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Sagefits about as well

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