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Gravy Stock

A stock made by simmering roast meat bones with fat, water, salt, and pepper for about four hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,777 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Gravy Stock

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Chop the bones from roast meat into small pieces.

  2. Fry the bones in a pan with a little dripping until browned.

  3. Pour off all the fat and add enough stock or water to cover the bones.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

Simmer and strain

  1. Boil for about 4 hours.

  2. Strain and use as required.

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. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Bones from roast meat
Provide the collagen and flavour that give the stock body and savoury depth.
Dripping
Carries heat for browning the bones and adds roasted, savoury aroma.
Stock or water
Liquid that extracts flavour and gelatin from the bones as it simmers.

The step that matters

Fry the bones until browned. Browning triggers the Maillard reaction, which builds deep roasted flavour and colour. Pale bones produce a flatter, weaker-tasting stock.

“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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