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A-gravy Without Meat

A gravy made with beer, water, spices, onion, and walnut pickle, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

A-gravy Without Meat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a basin, combine small beer, water, pepper, salt, grated lemon peel, bruised cloves, and walnut pickle.

  2. Slice the onion and fry it in butter until brown.

  3. Add the onion to the mixture in the basin.

  4. Cover and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

  5. Strain the gravy and let it cool, then remove the fat.

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. Clove + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Frying until brown adds deep, savoury flavour and colour to the gravy.
Butter
Fat used to fry the onion, carrying flavour and helping it brown.
Small beer
Liquid base that adds malty flavour and body to the gravy.
Walnut pickle
Adds concentrated, tangy and savoury flavour to the liquid.

The step that matters

Frying the onion until brown. Browning the onion in butter produces savoury, caramelised flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale onion gives a flat, sweet taste, so it should be cooked until well coloured before going into the liquid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beer, pepper, lemon, clove, walnut, butter):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, pepper, lemon, clove, walnut, butter. 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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