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Gravy for Any Meat Except Ham
Lift meat from vessel to where it will keep hot, covering it with pan that its own steam may keep it moist. Pour off all but enough of the drippings to cover bottom of vessel, and allow this to come to boiling point. Sift in flour until it covers drippings. Mix with fork till all the flour is moistened and it browns to a dark straw color. Add a tablespoon of hot water and stir till quite smooth. When it grows thicker than rich cream add a little more water, always allowing it to thicken smoothly, first stirring constantly from bottom and sides. After a little gravy has been made, good gravies left from other meats may be stirred in a little at a time instead of water and improve it. (Ham gravy must never be used with others.) season to taste and serve in a heated vessel separate from the meat.
— Mrs. Edith E. Hubbard
A pan-gravy method rather than a formulated recipe: no quantities are given because the amount of fat left in the roasting pan decides everything. A few points make the proportions and the sequence clear.
- The hinge: brown the roux before any liquidThe flour must be cooked in the fat until it reaches a dark straw color before water goes in. Skip that and the gravy tastes of raw flour no matter how long it simmers afterward.
- Working proportionsThe recipe gives no quantities. As a modern starting point, about 2 tablespoons fat to 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup liquid lands near the consistency the recipe implies: it tells you to add more water whenever the gravy grows thicker than rich cream, so the finish is roughly cream-thick. That makes about a cup.
- "Vessel" means the roasting panAll of this happens in the pan the meat came out of, set over a burner. The browned fond stuck to the bottom is the flavor; keep scraping it up as you stir.
- Adding water a tablespoon at a timeThe instruction is not fussiness. Adding hot liquid in small amounts to a hot roux is what prevents lumps; a large cold splash seizes the flour. Warm stock works better than water and needs the same gradual handling.
- Sifting in the flourSifting scatters the flour evenly over the fat instead of dropping it in clumps. Modern all-purpose flour can usually be sprinkled in and worked with a fork or whisk, though sifting still helps if you are adding it quickly.
- Saved graviesStirring in leftover gravy from earlier meals is sound in flavor terms but assumes a cold larder used within a day or two. Refrigerate any saved gravy and use it within three days, bringing it fully to a simmer as it goes in.
- Why ham gravy is excludedCured ham drippings are heavily salted and smoked; a spoonful will dominate a beef or poultry gravy and can push the salt past edible. Season only at the end, after any additions.
- Keeping the meat hotInverting a pan over the roast traps steam and softens any crust. If you want the exterior to stay crisp, tent loosely with foil instead and let the meat rest while the gravy is made.
Gravy of this kind — fat, flour, and liquid built in the roasting pan — is the plain English roux tradition that came to American kitchens intact, and it appears in community cookbooks like this one as a technique to be handed on rather than a dish to be measured. The refusal to mix ham gravy with any other likely reflects a household economy in which drippings and pan liquors were, by common account, saved in crocks and reused for days; smoked and salt-cured pork fat was said to be kept in its own pot precisely because it carried over so strongly. Contributions signed with a neighbor's name, as here, were the standard form of the community fundraising cookbook, a genre that preserved a great deal of everyday cooking that never reached a commercial press.