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Gravies and Sauces

A savory sauce made from celery, herbs, onion, butter, flour, and gravy, seasoned with optional pickled items and served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 379 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Gravies and Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavouring

  1. Combine celery and savory or herbs in a pot.

  2. Cover and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat butter in a stew pan.

  2. Fry the onion over high heat for 2 minutes until slightly colored.

  3. Stir in enough flour to form a stiff paste.

  4. Gradually mix in the prepared gravy.

  5. Let the mixture boil gently for 15 minutes until it thickens to a cream-like consistency.

  6. Strain the sauce through a sieve into a basin.

  7. Return the strained sauce to the stew pan.

  8. Season with pickled onions, walnuts, gherkins, mushroom ketchup, capers, ale, or vinegar as desired.

Serve

  1. Cover the bottom of a serving dish with toasted bread sippets to soak up the gravy.

  2. Garnish with fried bread sippets 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. Capers + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together379 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

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

  3. Celery + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while the onion and flour cook.
Flour
Thickens the gravy into a smooth, stiff base that sets as it boils.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma when lightly browned in the butter.
Celery
Contributes a fresh, aromatic vegetable flavour to the stock base.
Gravy made from bones
Supplies the main liquid and meaty savour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter. Stir the flour in fully so it forms a smooth paste before adding liquid. Lumps form if flour meets liquid unevenly, and cooking the raw flour briefly removes its starchy taste and lets it thicken evenly as the gravy boils.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, lemon, butter, flour, mushroom, capers, tarragon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, lemon, butter, flour, mushroom, capers, tarragon. 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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