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Garlic Gravy
Cut a pound of lean beef into slices, and put them into a stewpan with two ounces of rasped ham, a scraped carrot, and one clove of garlic. Brown the meat slightly on both sides, then pour over it one pint of stock or water, and add a bundle of savoury herbs, another clove, and a lemon sliced right through. Simmer gently for an hour, thicken the gravy with a dessert-spoonful of flour, mixed smoothly with a small quantity of water, and strain through a coarse sieve. Add salt and pepper to taste, and a little grated nutmeg. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for one pint of gravy.
A brown gravy in the old sense: a small braise of beef and ham whose liquid is the whole point, the meat being spent by the time it is strained out. It yields a pint.
- The ambiguous cloveThe first "clove of garlic" is clear enough; the later "another clove" is not, and could be a second garlic clove or a whole spice clove. Given that nutmeg finishes the gravy, a single spice clove reads as the more likely intent, but the original is genuinely unclear.
- Rasped hamRasped means grated or shaved from the raw ham with a rasp or coarse grater. Two ounces of any dry-cured raw ham, finely chopped, does the same work: salt, fat and savour to back up the lean beef.
- Brown properly"Brown the meat slightly" undersells the hinge of the dish. With only a pint of liquid and an hour of simmering, the colour and depth come almost entirely from the fond on the pan bottom. Take the beef and ham well past pale, then deglaze with the stock and scrape.
- The whole lemonA lemon sliced right through means rind, pith and all. An hour's simmer with the pith in will push the gravy towards bitterness by modern palates; taste at thirty minutes and lift the slices out if it is already sharp enough.
- Cut of beefA pound of lean beef here means stewing meat — shin, chuck or skirt. Sliced thin it gives up its gelatine and flavour quickly, which is what the hour is for; a tender roasting cut is wasted.
- ThickeningA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons, which is a light thickening for a pint — a gravy that coats rather than clings. Slake the flour with cold water to a thin cream and stir it in off the boil, then simmer a few minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- Straining and useStrain, then let it settle and skim any fat that rises. Serve as a sauce for roast or grilled meat rather than as a dish in itself.
- The cost line1s. 3d. is fifteen pence in pre-decimal money. It is a historical note, not a guide to anything you will pay now.
This is less a dish than a building block, one of a stock of small brown gravies, each one distinguished by a single dominant flavouring, in imitation of the French sauce repertoire that Carême and his successors are generally credited with codifying. Garlic sat awkwardly in that repertoire for English readers: nineteenth-century British cookery writers are often said to have treated it with open suspicion. One clove to a pint, boiled for an hour and then strained away entirely, is very much that attitude in practice — the flavour is meant to be sensed rather than identified. The whole sliced lemon and the grating of nutmeg point further back still, to what appears to have been an eighteenth-century English habit of finishing meat gravies with acid and warm spice, a habit that had largely faded from fashionable cooking by the time this dictionary appeared but survived in the domestic manuals.