Home › The Principles of Cookery › Meat Gravy for Sauces and Similar Purposes
Meat Gravy for Sauces and Similar Purposes
Place in a stewpan slices of bacon, veal, and some minced ham. The weight of meat put in will, of course, depend upon the quantity of juice required. The rule is usually to employ one pound and a half of meat for each pint of gravy. Then place in the stewpan some onions, carrots, parsnips, celery, parsley, thyme, chives, cloves, nutmeg, and pepper. Place the pan over a gentle fire until all the juice contained in the meat has escaped, then increase the heat until the juice has become as thick as it can be made without risk of burning it. Remove the meat, and put in as many lumps of butter the size of an egg as there were pounds of meat employed. Thicken with a proper quantity of flour, and form a roux. When this is done, put the meat back into the stewpan, pour in some stock broth, simmer for two hours, skim the liquid, and strain it.
This is a foundation sauce base rather than a finished dish: meat and aromatics are sweated until their juices caramelise, then a roux and stock are added and simmered down. The whole thing hinges on the glazing stage.
- The hinge: reduce to a glaze, not to a burn"Until the juice has become as thick as it can be made" means cooking the released meat juices down to a sticky brown film on the pan bottom. That fond is the entire flavour of the sauce; if it blackens, the finished gravy is bitter and cannot be rescued. Work over medium heat and watch the colour, not the clock.
- ProportionsA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so 1½ lb of meat per 2½ cups of finished gravy. The recipe does not specify how much stock to add; for three pounds of meat, something over 5 cups would allow for two hours' reduction.
- "Lumps of butter the size of an egg"Roughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons, each. One per pound of meat, so 3 lb of meat takes about 6 oz of butter, with flour to match by volume for the roux.
- Heat levels"A gentle fire" is low heat, enough to draw the juices out without frying the meat. The later simmer should be barely trembling, not a boil, or the sauce clouds and the fat will not rise cleanly for skimming.
- Meat to useVeal breast, shin or neck gives the gelatin that makes this set to a glossy sauce; a pound of veal bones added along with the meat improves it. Period bacon was generally milder than heavily smoked modern rashers, so unsmoked streaky or pancetta is the safer choice here.
- SaltThe original adds none. Bacon, ham and reduced stock together carry a great deal of salt, so season only at the very end, after straining.
- "Stock broth"Unsalted veal or light beef stock. Water gives a thin result; commercial cubes push it over the edge on salt.
- Straining and keepingStrain through a fine sieve or cloth, chill, and lift the fat cap off the top. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and freezes well in ice-cube trays, which is the practical way to use a sauce base like this.
This kind of preparation reflects nineteenth-century professional practice, in which almost every brown sauce began with something like it: a jus or fond brun built by sweating veal, bacon and root vegetables to a glaze, then thickening with a roux and moistening with stock. Carême and later Escoffier codified the same procedure as sauce espagnole, the mother sauce from which demi-glace and its many derivatives were drawn. The lavishness is the period speaking: a pound and a half of meat surrendered for a single pint of gravy made sense only in a household or hotel kitchen where a cook had a coal range alight all day anyway. The parsnip and chives are a reminder that the vegetable base was not yet fixed at the modern onion-carrot-celery mirepoix, and the cloves and nutmeg belong to an older English tradition of spicing savoury gravies that had largely faded by the twentieth century.