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Milk or Cream Gravy

A simple gravy made by thickening milk with corn starch and egg, seasoned with salt and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Milk or Cream Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, mix corn starch with a little milk or water to form a smooth batter.

  2. In a saucepan, bring the remaining milk to a boil.

  3. Stir in the corn starch mixture and cook for 2-3 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Remove from heat and quickly stir in the beaten egg.

  5. Add salt and butter 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a gravy.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the gravy body.
Egg
Adds richness and some body to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Stir the corn starch mixture in while the milk is boiling. Starch must be dispersed in a smooth batter first and stirred constantly while cooking, or it clumps. Starch thickens only once heated, so the mixture needs a few minutes of stirring to lose its raw taste and reach full thickness.

“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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