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Meat Gravy for Sauces
This preparation may be used in the composition of various sauces. It is obtained by straining the gravy produced by the cooking of meat, and boiling it down at a gentle heat to the consistency of sauce. Sometimes it is thickened, without being boiled down, by the addition of various materials, such as a roux of flour and butter, the yolks of hard-boiled eggs, tomato marmalade, or by chestnuts roasted and crushed to powder.
This is a method rather than a measured recipe: pan or roasting juices strained, reduced, and optionally thickened. A few of its terms and assumptions need translating.
- Skim before you reduceStraining does not take out the fat; it passes through with the juices. Let the strained juices settle a few minutes and lift the fat off, or chill them and take the cap off solid, before reducing. Fat left in will not emulsify at this concentration and the sauce turns greasy as it thickens.
- "Gentle heat" means a bare simmerA hard boil drives off aromatics, agitates the sediment back into suspension and clouds the result. Keep it at a lazy simmer in a wide pan; the wide surface, not the heat, is what speeds reduction.
- Salt lastThe original assumes lightly seasoned cooking juices. Reducing by half doubles the salt concentration, so season only when the sauce is at the consistency you want.
- Roux proportionsFor thickening without reduction, a standard blond roux is equal weights butter and flour; reckon on somewhere between 1 and 2 oz of each per pint of gravy, depending on how thick you want the finished sauce. Cook the flour in the butter two or three minutes before adding liquid or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Hard-boiled yolks as thickenerAn old liaison now rarely seen. The yolks are sieved and worked to a paste with a little butter, then whisked in off the boil; two yolks will lightly body a cup of gravy. Unlike raw yolks they will not curdle, but they also will not hold if the sauce is boiled hard afterwards.
- Tomato marmaladeProbably not the sweet preserve. In nineteenth-century usage a "marmalade" of tomatoes generally meant tomatoes cooked down to a thick pulp, usually sieved and usually unsweetened; the nearest modern equivalent is a heavy tomato passata reduced to paste, or a spoonful of tomato purée.
- ChestnutsRoasted and pounded chestnut gives a mild, slightly sweet body. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, dried in a hot oven and ground fine, do the same job; whisk in a tablespoon at a time and let it stand a minute to swell.
- Yield and keepingReckon on the finished sauce being a third to a half the volume you started with. Reduced meat gravy keeps three or four days refrigerated and freezes well in ice-cube trays, which is closer to how a modern cook will actually use it.
Nineteenth-century professional cookery was built on a hierarchy of stocks, glazes and gravies from which individual sauces were composed, an approach codified in French practice and widely reflected in English books of the period. The list of thickeners here is a snapshot of a system in transition. Roux was already dominant, but the older habit of binding sauces with pounded solids — bread, almonds, egg yolks, nuts — survived from medieval and early modern kitchens, where flour-and-butter binding was not yet standard. Chestnut in particular is generally traced to game and poultry cookery, where its sweetness suited the meat.