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The Spanjard's Qarlic Gravy

A savory gravy made with veal or beef, carrots, garlic, ham, broth, herbs, cloves, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

The Spanjard's Qarlic Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Slice the veal or beef and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Place in a stew-pan with carrots, garlic, ham, and water.

Brown and simmer

  1. Cook over gentle heat until the meat begins to stick to the pan, then turn it to brown well.

  2. Dredge with flour and pour in the broth, herbs, cloves, and lemon.

  3. Simmer gently for 1.5 hours.

Finish the gravy

  1. Remove fat and strain the gravy through a cloth, pressing hard.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal or beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long simmering and flavours the gravy.
Flour
Dredging thickens the broth into a gravy as the liquid simmers and reduces.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the stock as it cooks with the meat.
Garlic
Contributes a pungent aroma and sharp flavour that mellows during cooking.
Broth
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, carrying flavour from the meat and vegetables.

The step that matters

Browning the meat. Browning over gentle heat develops rich, roasted flavours through the Maillard reaction. Meat that is pale or steamed produces a weaker, less savoury gravy.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pepper, carrot, clove, ham, flour, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pepper, carrot, clove, ham, flour, lemon. 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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