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Gravy Without Stock
Cut up two small onions and one carrot; place them with a little lean beef in a stewpan with a bit of butter and brown all together; next add enough water to cover the mass and stir slowly until the vegetables are cooked. Strain, thicken with flour and add pepper, salt and catsup. Color brown with caramel if necessary.
A quick brown gravy built from scratch when no stockpot is going — essentially a miniature mirepoix browned with a scrap of beef and extended with water. The quantities are left to the cook, so treat the proportions below as a working starting point.
- Quantities to work fromThe recipe specifies none of this. Two small onions and one carrot would suit something like a quarter-pound of lean beef (chuck or shin, finely diced), with water just to cover as the text says. Expect somewhere in the region of a pint of gravy.
- The browning is the whole dishWith no stock behind it, all the flavour comes from the fond. Cook the onion, carrot and beef in butter over medium heat until they are genuinely brown and sticking to the pan, then deglaze with the water and scrape. Pale vegetables give thin, watery gravy.
- "Stir slowly until the vegetables are cooked"Read this as a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil, long enough for the vegetables to soften — probably around half an hour. The instruction to stir would suit a shallow stewpan over a solid-fuel range, where scorching came easily; on a modern burner an occasional stir is enough.
- Thickening with flourThe original assumes the cook knows how. Either work a tablespoon of flour to a tablespoon of butter as beurre manié and whisk it in, or slake the flour in cold water first. Simmer three or four minutes after thickening so the raw flour taste cooks out.
- CatsupAt this period catsup could still mean mushroom or walnut catsup — thin, dark, salty and anchovy-adjacent — rather than sweetened tomato, though bottled tomato ketchup was by then the commoner article. A teaspoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire gives the savoury effect; tomato ketchup will make it noticeably sweeter.
- Caramel colouringHousehold caramel was sugar cooked past dark brown, almost to bitterness, then let down with a little hot water and bottled. A few drops darken the gravy without sweetening it. Gravy browning sold in bottles does the same job.
- StrainingStrain, pressing the solids firmly to get the liquid out, and discard them — they have given up everything they have. The beef will be exhausted and stringy and is not worth saving.
- Season at the endReduction concentrates salt, and catsup brings its own. Hold the salt until the gravy is thickened and at final volume.
Recipes titled "without stock" are a fixture of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, and they mark a real change in the kitchen. An older household kept a stockpot on the back of the range more or less permanently, fed with bones and trimmings; a smaller apartment kitchen with a gas range did not, and commercial bouillon cubes and meat extracts took over the work. Such books aimed squarely at that reader, the woman running a modest household without a cook. Hence a gravy that manufactures its own foundation from an onion, a carrot and a few ounces of beef, with bottled catsup and homemade caramel standing in for the depth and colour that long simmering would otherwise supply.