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Strong Savoury Gravy, or Brown Sauce

A hearty beef or veal gravy made with ham or bacon, vegetables, and mushroom ketchup, simmered and thickened with arrowroot or flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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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 ↓

Strong Savoury Gravy, or Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a 4-quart stewpan, layer the ham or bacon at the bottom.

  2. Add the beef or veal, carrot, onion, cloves, celery, parsley, lemon, thyme, and lemon peel.

  3. Stir in the mushroom ketchup and wine, then pour in ½ cup of water.

  4. Cover and simmer gently for 30 minutes until almost dry.

  5. Carefully turn the meat to brown on all sides.

Make the gravy

  1. Add 3 pints of boiling water and boil gently for 2 hours.

  2. For a thicker gravy, mix arrowroot or flour with a ladleful of gravy, stir quickly, and add a quart more gravy.

  3. Pour back into the stewpan and simmer, stirring occasionally.

  4. Remove any scum that appears and strain through a coarse cloth 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.

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

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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 flavour and body that the long simmer draws into the gravy.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami depth to the finished brown sauce.
Arrowroot or flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the back of a spoon.
Wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the liquid as it reduces.

The step that matters

Browning the meat before adding the water. Turning the meat until well browned on all sides builds caramelised, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction, which gives the gravy its deep colour and taste. Pale meat produces a weaker, greyer sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, beef, carrot, onion, clove, celery, parsley):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Orangefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, beef, carrot, onion, clove, celery, parsley. 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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