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Gravy for Roast Meat, or Plain Hashes

A savory gravy made from beef and mutton trimmings, onions, herbs, and spices, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Gravy for Roast Meat, or Plain Hashes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Wash the beef and mutton trimmings in warm water.

  2. Place them in a pan with a little water at the bottom.

Make the gravy

  1. Add the onion, parsley, peppercorns, salt, bay leaf, garlic, and allspice.

  2. Stew until the meat is browned.

  3. Remove the fat and add boiling water to the pan.

  4. Simmer gently for 3 hours.

  5. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve into a pan, discarding the fat.

  6. If a stronger flavor is desired, boil the gravy a little longer.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Scrag end of beef
Provides meat and connective tissue that release flavor and body into the stock as it simmers.
Trimmings of mutton
Adds rich, savory meat flavor to the stock during long, gentle simmering.
Onion
Contributes sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock as it cooks.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows and rounds out during simmering.

The step that matters

Stew until the meat is browned. Browning the meat through Maillard reactions develops deep, roasted flavor compounds that carry into the finished gravy. Pale meat produces a flatter, less savory result.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, mutton, onion, parsley, clove, garlic):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Pepperfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, mutton, onion, parsley, clove, garlic. 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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