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Quite Common Brown Gravy

A gravy made from sliced sheep's melt simmered with butter, water, salt, pepper, and optional aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme 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 ↓

Quite Common Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the sheep's melt into slices half an inch thick and lightly flour them.

Brown the melt

  1. Fry the slices until pale brown.

  2. Melt butter in a thick saucepan and shake the slices over moderate heat until colored.

Make the gravy

  1. Gradually pour in 2 to 3 cups of boiling water.

  2. Add a light seasoning of salt and pepper, and stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  3. Strain the gravy and skim off the fat 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's melt
Provides the meat and flavour that the gravy is built on.
Butter
Carries the heat for browning the slices and adds richness to the gravy.
Flour (in the method)
Light coating on the slices that helps them brown and gives the gravy body.

The step that matters

Browning the slices in butter. Slices that are only pale rather than well coloured give a weak, washed-out gravy. Browning develops deeper flavour through the Maillard reaction, so the colour should be built slowly over moderate heat without scorching.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, parsley, lemon, thyme, ham, celery):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, lemon, thyme, ham, celery. 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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