Skip to main content
Main

Quite Common Brown Gravy

A brown gravy made from sliced sheep's meat, butter, water, salt, pepper, and optional aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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 ↓

Quite Common Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the sheep's meat into slices ½ inch thick and lightly flour them.

  2. Fry the slices until pale brown.

  3. Melt butter in a thick saucepan.

  4. Shake the slices over moderate heat until colored.

Make the gravy

  1. Gradually pour in ½ to ¾ pint of boiling water.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  4. Strain the gravy and skim off the fat before serving.

Optional additions

  1. For added flavor, brown a minced onion with the meat.

  2. Add lemon thyme when serving with ducks or geese.

  3. You can enhance the gravy with celery, carrot, lean ham, or mushroom catsup 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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's meat
Provides the main savoury flavour and body of the gravy as it stews.
Flour (in the method)
Dusting the slices helps them brown and gives the gravy a slightly thickened body.
Butter
Fat for frying the slices, carrying flavour and helping them colour evenly.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid base that extracts flavour from the browned meat during stewing.

The step that matters

Shake the slices over moderate heat until colored. Browning the floured meat creates Maillard flavour compounds that give the gravy its depth. Too little colour makes it pale and bland, while too high heat can scorch the flour and taste bitter.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, parsley, lemon, celery, carrot, ham):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, lemon, celery, carrot, ham. 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.

More brown gravy recipes

English 15Soup 10Rich 6Vegetable 3 See all 87 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes