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Brown Gravy

A savory gravy made with onion, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, water, vinegar, sugar, spices, and ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Brown Gravy

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and fry the chopped onion, carrot, and turnip until dark brown.

  2. Add the flour and water, stirring until the mixture boils.

  3. Stir in the parsley, herbs, bay leaf, vinegar, sugar, spices, and seasoning to taste.

  4. Simmer on low heat for about 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the gravy and add the ketchup before serving.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion, carrot, and turnip
Browning in the butter builds deep color and savory flavor as their sugars caramelize.
Butter
Fat that carries the browning and adds richness to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, cohesive gravy as it boils.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the savory flavor.
Ketchup
Adds tomato sweetness, acidity, and extra color to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables until dark brown. Deep browning caramelizes the vegetables' natural sugars and forms rich, roasted flavor compounds. Pale vegetables give a flat, washed-out gravy, so the color needs to go well past light gold.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, parsley, butter, flour, vinegar, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsley, butter, flour, vinegar, sugar. 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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