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Gravy, English, Brown
Cut six ounces of lean ham into square pieces, and fry a nice brown. When done, remove them from the frying-pan into a stewpan. Then fry two pounds of neck or shin of beef, lightly floured, also a middle-sized onion, or two or three shallots. Place them all together in the stewpan with the ham, and cover with about two pints of stock; skim as the liquid boils, and add salt, a few cloves, peppercorns, a blade of mace, a small bunch of herbs, a carrot, and a head of celery. Let all boil till reduced in quantity to one-half; then strain, and when quite cold, take off the fat. When required, heat the gravy again, and flavour with the sauce best adapted to the dish for which it is intended. If the gravy be properly boiled, it will be thick enough. Half this quantity is sufficient at a time, and careful housekeepers would reduce the quantity of meat. Time, from three to four hours. Probable cost of beef, about 8d. per pound. Sufficient for one pint of gravy.
A Victorian brown gravy in the older sense: a concentrated meat stock reduced by half, meant to be kept cold and drawn on as needed. It is closer to a demi-glace than to pan gravy.
- The hinge: reduce, do not thickenThe body comes largely from gelatin in the shin and from the reduction by half, not from a roux; the light flouring of the beef is mainly there to help it brown, and adds only a little thickening. If the finished liquid is thin, keep reducing rather than adding starch.
- Cut of beefShin (foreshank) is the right choice and still cheap. Neck is harder to find whole; ask for beef shank cross-cuts or use a boneless chuck plus a split marrow bone for gelatin.
- Lean hamSix ounces of lean uncooked or dry-cured ham, not sweet-glazed supermarket sliced ham, whose sugar will scorch in the pan. A piece of gammon, prosciutto end or a ham hock trimming works.
- Stock, not waterTwo pints (British, so 40 fl oz / 1.1 litres) of light beef or veal stock. Using water gives a thin result, since the recipe relies on doubling up an already savoury base.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg. A pinch of ground mace, or a light grating of nutmeg, substitutes; it is a distinctly 19th-century warm note and easy to overdo.
- Skimming and degreasingSkim the scum as it first comes to the boil, then hold it at a bare simmer for the three to four hours. Chilling overnight lets the fat set into a disc you can lift off whole, which is the cleanest way to do it.
- Yield and keepingOne pint (about 20 fl oz / 570 ml) of finished gravy. Refrigerated under its fat cap it keeps three or four days; it freezes well in ice-cube trays, which is the modern answer to the book's advice to make half a quantity.
- FinishingThe instruction to "flavour with the sauce best adapted to the dish" means a spoonful of mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire, port, redcurrant jelly or the roasting-tin scrapings, added at the reheat rather than during the long boil.
In Victorian usage "gravy" often meant not the juices of a roast but a stock-like preparation made in advance and kept in the larder as a foundation for sauces — the English cousin of French jus and espagnole, arrived at by reduction rather than by a flour-based mother sauce. The asides about cost and about "careful housekeepers" reducing the meat are characteristic of the household dictionaries of the 1870s onward, which addressed cooks buying by the pound and quoted beef at eightpence, and the quantities involved — two pounds of shin and six ounces of ham for a single pint of gravy — were substantial even then.