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Gravy for Cutlets
Put a piece of butter the size of a walnut into a saucepan, and, when melted, fry two sliced onions in it until they are lightly browned. Add gradually one pint of good stock, half a dozen peppercorns, two sprigs of parsley, three or four cloves, and a crust of bread toasted brown and hard on both sides, but not burnt. Simmer gently for one hour, then strain, and thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour. Add salt to taste, and a table-spoonful of mushroom or walnut ketchup. A little browning may be added, if necessary. If no stock is at hand, a tea-spoonful of Bovril may be diluted with some warm water and used instead. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for nearly a pint of gravy.
A brown onion gravy built on stock, thickened at the end rather than the beginning. The method is sound; only the pantry items need translating.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon, about 15 g. Enough to sweat two onions if you keep the heat moderate and stir; add a little more if the pan runs dry before the onions colour.
- The toasted crustThis is the flavouring that does the most work — it supplies colour and a faint bitterness that keeps the onion sweetness in check. Toast it hard and dry right through, well past golden, but stop short of black or the whole pint will taste acrid.
- Stock qualityA pint (British measure, 20 fl oz / 570 ml) of unsalted or lightly salted stock. Salt goes in only at the end, after the hour's simmering and straining, so season then rather than at the start.
- Bovril as substituteStill sold, and still a yeast-and-beef extract paste. A teaspoon in a pint is a thin proposition by modern standards; two teaspoons, or a good commercial stock concentrate, gives something closer to the "good stock" the recipe prefers.
- Butter and flour thickeningMash equal weights of soft butter and flour into a paste — about 2 teaspoons each for this quantity — and whisk it into the strained gravy in small pieces off the boil, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour. Adding dry flour to hot liquid will lump.
- KetchupMushroom and walnut ketchup here mean the thin, dark, salty Victorian condiments, not tomato. Walnut ketchup is still made in Britain; a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce plus a little soy is the nearest common stand-in, added off the heat.
- BrowningA caramel colouring, bought ready-made or made at home from burnt sugar, used chiefly for colour. Caramel gravy brownings are still sold; a longer, darker browning of the onions does much the same job with more flavour.
- YieldA little under a pint after straining, as the recipe states.
A Victorian kitchen was expected to produce gravy as a standing skill, not a one-off recipe: cutlets were grilled or fried to order, and the sauce was made up from the stock the kitchen had to hand. The toasted crust is an old economy trick for colour and body, used before caramel colouring was cheap and shop-bought; mushroom and walnut ketchups were the everyday umami condiments of English cooking well before tomato ketchup displaced them; and the alternative of a teaspoon of Bovril points to households that no longer kept a stockpot going. Bovril — dating from the 1870s, and the Bovril name from 1886 — is exactly the kind of branded convenience that began to appear in the big Victorian compendia. The costing in pence — fourpence for a pint of gravy — was a standard feature of Cassell's, aimed at the cook-housekeeper answerable to a weekly budget.