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Quite Common Brown Gravy

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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 ↓

Quite Common Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Fry the slices until pale brown.

Make the gravy

  1. Melt butter in a thick saucepan and cook the slices over moderate heat until colored.

  2. Gradually pour in ½ to ¾ pint of boiling water.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, then stew gently for 1.5 hours.

Finish

  1. 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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  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 main meaty body and flavor that the gravy is built around.
Butter
Carries the browning of the slices and adds richness to the gravy.
Boiling water
Dissolves the browned bits from the pan and forms the liquid base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the slices until colored. Browning caramelises the flour and meat surfaces through the Maillard reaction, creating the deep color and savory flavor of the gravy. Pale slices give a weak, thin taste, so they should be cooked until well colored before the water goes in.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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