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Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

A simple gravy made from a boiled fowl neck, water, salt, pepper, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy base

  1. Boil the neck of the fowl in ½ cup of water with a little salt, pepper, and any spices or herbs you prefer.

  2. Stew gently for at least 1 hour to avoid reducing too much.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain the fat from the dripping pan when the fowl is ready.

  2. Strain the liquid from the neck into the pan, mixing smoothly.

  3. Heat the gravy.

  4. Add more salt and pepper or cayenne if needed.

  5. Serve hot.

Prepare the fowl

  1. Baste the fowl with butter.

  2. Dust the fowl with flour before roasting.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Fowl neck
Simmers into a rich, savoury liquid that forms the body of the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for basting, helping the skin brown and turn golden in the oven.
Flour
Dusted on the fowl, it helps browning and gives the drippings body for thickening.

The step that matters

Stew gently for at least 1 hour. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the neck slowly while letting water evaporate only slowly. Boiling hard or cooking too long reduces the liquid too much and can make the gravy salty and thick.

“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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