Brown Gravy
Take the gravy that drips from the meat; add a little water, one spoonful butter, a little flour, a little pepper and a little salt. Stew all together.--Miss E. P.
A pan gravy stripped to its essentials, written for a cook who already knew what consistency to stop at. The proportions are all left to judgment, so the numbers below are working ones.
- Working proportionsFor about a cup of gravy, use 2 tablespoons of the drippings plus butter, 2 tablespoons flour, and a cup of liquid. "Spoonful" in books of this period usually means a tablespoon, but the recipe does not say.
- Cook the flourFlour needs to cook in the fat two or three minutes to lose its raw taste, or the gravy tastes pasty; the recipe as written simply directs that everything be stewed together.
- Lump insuranceAdd the water off the heat and in stages, whisking smooth after each, or shake flour and cold water together in a jar and pour that in. Flour tossed into hot liquid seizes immediately.
- Deglaze the roasting panThe drippings alone are thin. Set the pan over a burner, add the water, and scrape up the browned fond stuck to the bottom -- that is where most of the colour and flavour in a brown gravy actually lives.
- Fat balanceIf the roast has thrown a lot of fat, spoon most of it off and skip the butter; the butter is there for when the drippings are scant, as with a lean joint or poultry.
- Season lastDrippings from a salted roast are already salty and the gravy concentrates as it reduces. Taste at the end rather than salting at the start.
- YieldUsing the proportions suggested above, roughly a cup, enough for four to six servings alongside a roast; the recipe itself sets no quantity.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is full of entries like this one: a few lines, initials instead of a name, and no quantities worth speaking of. Recipes were aides-memoire for cooks who had learned by standing at the stove, not instructions for beginners, and a brown gravy was assumed knowledge in any house that roasted meat. The method itself is the roux-thickened pan gravy, often traced to French practice reaching English and American kitchens in the eighteenth century, distinguished from "white" gravies and sauces by the browning of the flour and the use of the caramelised residue in the roasting pan. Its survival comes out of a simple economy: never let the drippings go to waste.