Home › The Principles of Cookery › Gravy for Boiled Meat
Gravy for Boiled Meat
Boiled meat is usually sent to table with a little of the liquid in which the meat was cooked. When a variation is desired, half a pint of the liquid may be thickened with a little flour and butter, and flavoured with a table-spoonful of finely-chopped pickled gherkins or walnuts, and a dessert-spoonful of minced parsley. A tea-spoonful of mustard mixed with a small quantity of vinegar may then be added. This sauce should, of course, be served in a tureen, not put on the same dish as the meat. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient, half a pint for four or five persons.
A thrifty pan sauce built on the cooking liquor from boiled beef, mutton or bacon. The whole thing hinges on how salty that liquor is, which the original never mentions.
- Taste the liquor firstBoiled meat is often salted meat, and its cooking water can then be far too salty to reduce or thicken. Taste before you commit; if it is fierce, cut it with water or unsalted stock, and hold back the mustard and pickles until you have judged the seasoning.
- Half a pint, imperialAn English half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups or 285 ml. That is the finished yield, stated as enough for four or five, so roughly 2 fl oz of sauce a head.
- Flour and butterThe recipe does not say how. Kneading equal weights raw into a paste (beurre manie) and whisking it into the simmering liquid in small pieces is one straightforward reading. About 15 g each of butter and flour will thicken 285 ml to a light coating consistency. A cooked roux works equally well if you prefer.
- A quarter of an hourThe recipe gives fifteen minutes as the total time without saying what it covers; it is enough to simmer out the raw flour taste. Add the gherkins, walnuts, parsley and mustard near the end so the herb stays green and the mustard keeps its edge; mustard loses pungency when boiled.
- Pickled walnutsStill sold in Britain, rarely elsewhere. They are green walnuts pickled in spiced malt vinegar, black and soft, with a sharp musky flavour closer to a strong chutney than to a nut. Capers or cornichons make a plausible substitute; gherkins alone are the simpler option the recipe already allows.
- Spoon sizesA Victorian dessert-spoon is about two teaspoons, so roughly 10 ml of parsley. The tablespoon of chopped pickle is a generous amount in so small a quantity of sauce — start with two-thirds and adjust.
- Mustard and vinegarMost likely English mustard powder slaked with vinegar rather than water, giving heat plus acidity. Ready-made English mustard already contains vinegar; use about a teaspoon and skip the extra unless the sauce tastes dull.
- ServingThe instruction about the tureen is a matter of period table manners, but it has a practical side: a flour-thickened sauce poured over sliced boiled meat greys the surface and pools. Keep it separate and hot.
Boiled beef, mutton and bacon were staples of the plain English table, and the pot liquor they left behind was too useful to waste and too plain to serve as it stood. The answer here is a sauce built entirely from the store cupboard -- flour, butter, mustard, vinegar and the jar of pickles -- costing the threepence the book quotes. Pickled walnuts and gherkins appear frequently in nineteenth-century English cookery as a sharp counterweight to boiled and salted meats, the same instinct that pairs mustard with corned beef today. The direction to send the sauce in a tureen rather than on the dish reflects a service style in which sauces were passed separately, so each diner took what they wanted.