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Gravies and Sauces

A savory sauce made with celery, savory herbs, onion, butter, flour, bone gravy, and pickled condiments, served with toasted bread sippets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,137 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Gravies and Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavour base

  1. In a pot, combine celery and savory, cover, and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  2. In a stew pan, heat butter and fry the onion over high heat for 2 minutes until slightly colored.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir in enough flour to form a stiff paste, then gradually mix in the gravy from the bones.

  2. Let the mixture boil gently for 15 minutes until it thickens to a cream-like consistency.

  3. Strain the sauce through a sieve into a basin, then return it to the stew pan.

  4. Season with pickled onions, walnuts, gherkins, mushroom ketchup, capers, ale, or vinegar as desired.

Serve

  1. Toast bread and cut it into triangles to serve as sippets, placing them at the bottom of the dish to soak up 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.

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. Lemon + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

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

  2. Celery + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

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

  3. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main vegetable flavour and aroma of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the fried onion.
Flour
Thickens the gravy into a stiff paste and then a smooth, cream-like sauce.
Gravy made from bones
Forms the savoury liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma after frying in butter.

The step that matters

Adding the gravy to the flour paste. Flour must be cooked into the butter and then mixed in gradually with the liquid. Adding it all at once or too quickly can leave lumps, while a stiff paste that is loosened slowly stays smooth and thickens evenly as it simmers.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, lemon, butter, flour, mushroom, tarragon, bread):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, lemon, butter, flour, mushroom, tarragon, bread. 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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