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Fried Bacon, Cream Gravy

A dish of fried bacon topped with a smooth cream gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Bacon, Cream Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the bacon

  1. Fry the bacon in a skillet on both sides until the edges curl up.

  2. Remove the bacon and keep it warm.

Make the gravy

  1. Add flour to the bacon fat in the skillet and stir until smooth.

  2. Gradually add milk, stirring continuously, and cook for five minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the bacon 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the milk and fat into a smooth gravy as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, which thickens as the starch swells.
Bacon
Its rendered fat carries the flavour of the gravy and the meat is served with it.

The step that matters

Adding the milk gradually while stirring. Flour needs to be dispersed in fat before liquid is added. Pouring the milk in all at once or without constant stirring forms lumps, because flour clumps when hit with liquid. Adding it slowly while stirring keeps the gravy smooth.

“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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