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Gravy From Boiled Meat

A gravy made from boiled meat broth, fried onions, bacon bone, optional turnip or dried mushroom, and optional coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gravy From Boiled Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. In a pot, combine the broth from boiled meat with the fried onions and bacon bone.

  2. If available, add the turnip or dried mushroom for extra flavor.

  3. Simmer the mixture, adding coloring if desired, until well combined.

Serve

  1. Serve the gravy over roasted meats or use it as a base for soup.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

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

  3. Meat + turniptop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Broth from boiled meat
Forms the liquid base and carries the savory meat flavor of the gravy.
Onions
Fried brown, they add sweetness and deep color and aroma to the gravy.
Bacon bone
Adds smoky, salty savoriness that flavors the simmering liquid.

Swap the turnip

The recipe marks turnip as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion. 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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