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Cream Gravy
1½ cups well-seasoned chicken stock. 1/2 cup hot cream. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper.
PROCESS: Cook butter in a sauce-pan with onion until onion is delicately browned. Remove onion, add flour mixed with seasonings; stir to a smooth paste and brown lightly. Add hot stock gradually, stirring constantly. Add hot cream and beat until smooth and glossy. The color of this sauce is that of Café au Lait.
A light velouté in all but name, built on chicken stock and finished with cream. The printed ingredient list on this page is incomplete, so read the notes before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe process calls for butter, onion and flour, but the ingredient list as printed gives only the stock, cream, salt and pepper. The amounts are genuinely absent, not merely archaic; the standard proportion for a sauce of this body is 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour per cup of liquid, with a thick slice of onion for flavouring.
- The hinge: colour of the roux"brown lightly" and "the color of Café au Lait" are all the guidance given. Cook the flour and butter to a pale tan, no darker; a darker roux tastes scorched and thickens less. Expect a few minutes over medium heat, but go by colour rather than the clock.
- The onion is a flavouring, not an ingredientIt is browned in the butter and then removed, leaving a sweet, faintly caramelised note behind. A halved small onion or a few thick slices does the job; discard it before adding the flour.
- Hot liquid, gradual additionBoth the stock and the cream go in hot. Adding cold liquid to a hot roux is the usual cause of lumps, and reheating the sauce to smooth it out costs you the gloss the recipe asks for.
- Seasoning the flourSalt and pepper are mixed into the flour rather than added at the end, which distributes them evenly. Taste again after the cream goes in, since a well-reduced stock may already be salty.
- Do not boil after the creamDo not boil hard after the cream -- The recipe says only to beat until smooth and glossy. Keep the heat gentle at this stage; a hard boil can dull the sheen and risks the cream catching.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough for a roast chicken or a platter of fried chicken serving four to six.
52 Sunday Dinners is generally credited to Elizabeth O. Hiller and was issued in the 1910s as a promotional cookbook for the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of the shortening Cottolene — one of a great many American cookbooks of the period underwritten by a food manufacturer. The gravy itself is a domesticated velouté: the French sauce of white roux moistened with a light stock, here enriched with cream and given an American name. Its appearance in a Sunday-dinner book is telling, since the roast or fried chicken it accompanied is often said to have been a centrepiece of the middle-class Sunday table, and a properly made smooth gravy was one of the visible marks of a trained cook. The instruction to match the colour of café au lait is characteristic of the era's teaching: with reliable thermometers uncommon in the average kitchen, cookery-school writers described doneness by eye, and by reference to things every reader had already seen.