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Quite Common Brown Gravy

A brown gravy made from sheep's melt, flour, butter, water, salt, pepper, and optional onion and lemon thyme.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Quite Common Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Make the gravy

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

  2. Gradually add ½ to ¾ pint of boiling water, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  3. Stew the gravy gently for 1.5 hours.

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

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

  2. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sheep’s melt
Provides the meaty base and flavour that the gravy is built on.
Flour
Coats the slices and thickens the liquid as it cooks.
Butter
Fat for browning the floured slices, adding richness and colour.

The step that matters

Coloring the slices in butter. Browning the floured slices over moderate heat creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale slices give a bland gravy, while over-dark, burnt flour tastes bitter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, pepper, 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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