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Gravy for Turkey
Take an onion and chop as fine as possible. Put it into a fryingpan with a little butter and fry until it is dark brown. Put three gills of stock into a saucepan with a little finely-chopped ham, a sprig each of parsley and thyme, a little Worcestershire sauce, and salt and pepper to taste, then boil for from five to ten minutes. Strain into a basin or sauceboat.
A thin, unthickened pan gravy in the French manner — closer to a jus than the flour-bound gravy most American cooks expect. Read the method carefully: the browned onion is never explicitly returned to the pan, but it is plainly meant to go into the stock with the ham and herbs.
- Three gills of stockReckoning a gill at half a cup, this is 1 1/2 cups (British sources put a gill at 5 fl oz, which would give nearer 2 cups). After the short boil and straining you will have a little less than you started with — a modest amount, and worth doubling for a whole bird.
- Combine the two pansScrape the browned onion and its butter into the saucepan with the stock, or simply pour the stock into the frying pan and deglaze. Nothing else in the recipe accounts for the onion, which is where the colour and most of the flavour live.
- Dark brown, not burntChopped onion in butter over medium heat takes 15 to 20 minutes to reach a genuine deep brown. Rushed over high heat it scorches, and scorched onion turns the whole gravy bitter — there is no flour or cream here to hide it.
- The ham does the saltingFinely chopped ham, plus Worcestershire, plus a reduced stock will carry a good deal of salt on their own. Season only after straining.
- Worcestershire, sparingly"A little" means half a teaspoon at most in this volume; more and it will dominate the thyme.
- If you want it thickThe recipe contains no thickener. For a conventional gravy, whisk a tablespoon of flour into the butter and onion before the stock goes in, and simmer a few minutes longer to cook out the raw taste.
- Use the roasting panSubstituting the turkey's defatted pan drippings for part of the stock is entirely in keeping with the method and improves it considerably.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) ran to some 900 pages of short, telegraphic entries like this one, written for a readership that already knew how to cook and wanted the hotel's way of doing things. The gravy here is essentially a small brown sauce built on stock rather than the flour-and-drippings gravy of American home cookery — a reflection of the Waldorf's French-trained kitchen, where thickening with roux was a decision rather than a default. The chopped ham is an old economical trick for adding cured depth to a sauce quickly. Worcestershire sauce, then a few decades into its American popularity, turns up in Oscar's savoury entries, which says as much about late-Victorian taste as it does about the dish.