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Brown Gravy

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Brown Gravy

Why it works: Lemon and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,973 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the sheep's melt into slices ½ inch thick and lightly dust them with flour.

  2. In a thick saucepan, melt the butter over moderate heat.

Make the gravy

  1. Add the floured slices and cook until they are a pale brown, shaking the pan occasionally.

  2. Gradually pour in the boiling water and season with pepper and salt.

  3. Stew the gravy gently for 1.5 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the gravy and skim off the fat before serving.

  2. For ducks or geese, brown the minced onion with the melt and add the lemon thyme.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's melt
The main meat, whose juices and browned surfaces flavour the gravy.
Flour
Coats the slices and thickens the liquid as the gravy simmers.
Butter
Fat for browning the floured slices and adding richness to the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the floured slices. Cooking the floured slices until pale brown builds savoury flavour through browning, while the flour coat sets the base for thickening. Shaking the pan keeps the slices from scorching unevenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, pepper, lemon, thyme. 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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