Skip to main content
Main

Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

A simple gravy made from boiled fowl neck, water, salt, pepper, and optional cayenne, strained and heated.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cheap Gravy for a Roast Fowl

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Cut the neck of the fowl into small pieces.

  2. Boil the neck in ½ pint of water with salt, pepper, and any herbs or spices for flavor.

  3. Stew gently for at least 1 hour until the liquid reduces.

Make the gravy

  1. When the fowl is ready, drain the fat from the dripping pan.

  2. Strain the liquid from the neck into the dripping pan and mix smoothly.

  3. Pass the gravy through a strainer again, heat it, and adjust seasoning with salt, pepper, or cayenne if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve the gravy extremely hot.

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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Neck of the fowl
Simmered to release flavour and body into the water, forming the base of the gravy.
Good butter
Used for basting, adding richness and helping the skin brown during roasting.

The step that matters

Stew gently for at least 1 hour until the liquid reduces. A gentle simmer extracts flavour from the neck slowly and concentrates the liquid without boiling it hard, which can make the gravy cloudy and tough-tasting.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes