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Good Beef or Veal Gravy

A thickened beef or veal gravy with onion, carrot, herbs, mace, peppercorns, and arrowroot, optionally flavored with mushroom catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Good Beef or Veal Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Lightly flour and fry the beef or veal in a bit of butter.

  2. Drain the meat from the fat and place it in a small thick stewpan or iron saucepan.

Make the gravy

  1. Pour in the boiling water and skim off any foam.

  2. Add the fried onion, sliced carrot, herbs, mace, and peppercorns.

  3. Stew gently for 3 to 3½ hours.

  4. Pass the gravy through a sieve into a clean pan and let it cool.

  5. Once cold, remove all the fat.

Serve

  1. Heat the desired amount for serving and thicken with arrowroot mixed with a little mushroom catsup if needed.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef or veal
Provides the meat that breaks down during slow stewing to flavour the broth.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid base that extracts flavour from the meat and vegetables.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the broth as it stews.
Arrowroot
Thickens the gravy into a smooth, glossy consistency when heated.

The step that matters

Removing the fat after cooling. Fat floats and sets on top of the chilled gravy, so removing it once cold leaves a clean, less greasy result. Skimming while warm is harder because the fat stays liquid and mixes in.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, thyme, parsley, arrowroot, mushroom):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, thyme, parsley, arrowroot, mushroom. 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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