Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Meat Gravy
Meat Gravy
Cut off the rind from one pound of raw lean ham, put it in a saucepan with a little butter, and add four onions, each cut into quarters. Put about six pounds of fillet of veal and the same of gravy beef in the saucepan, add one pint of general stock, put the pan on the fire and reduce the liquor to a dark glaze, taking care not to let it burn. Now add two gallons of stock, one fowl, a bunch of herbs and a lump of salt; boil up again, remove the pan to the side of the fire and allow the contents to simmer for four hours. Strain through a cloth, remove the fat, and it is ready to serve. It may be clarified for jelly if necessary with the whites of two eggs and one pound of pounded veal.
This is a hotel-scale brown gravy — closer to what a French kitchen calls jus de veau than to a pan gravy — and the quantities assume a brigade and a coal range. Everything here works at a sixth of the size in a domestic stockpot.
- The hinge: the glazeReducing the pint of stock down onto the meat and onions until it is a dark glaze is what gives the finished gravy its colour and depth. It wants low heat and constant attention in the last few minutes; once the sugars in the onion catch, the whole batch tastes acrid and no amount of stock will hide it.
- ScaleTwelve pounds of meat plus a fowl and two gallons of stock is well over thirty pounds of raw material and needs a stockpot of four gallons or more. Divide by six for a home batch: 1 lb veal, 1 lb beef shin, about 1.3 quarts stock, a few ounces of ham, one onion, and skip the whole fowl in favour of a couple of chicken wings or a thigh.
- Gravy beefButcher's term for cheap, gelatinous, well-worked cuts sold for stewing — shin, shank, neck or leg. Shin is the closest single substitute and supplies the collagen that makes the strained liquid set to jelly.
- General stockThe book's plain everyday stock from bones and trimmings, unseasoned and unthickened. Unsalted commercial beef or chicken stock stands in; avoid anything already salted, since long simmering concentrates whatever seasoning is in it.
- "Remove to the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the plate, where liquid holds at a bare tremble, well below boiling. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and clouds it, which is exactly what the four-hour simmer is meant to avoid.
- DegreasingSkimming hot is inefficient. Chill the strained liquid overnight and lift the fat off as a solid cap; it will come away clean, and the gravy beneath will likely have set to a soft jelly.
- Clarifying for jellyThe pounded veal and egg whites form a raft: whisk them into the cold, degreased stock, bring it up slowly without stirring once it clouds, and let it simmer 20-30 minutes before ladling the liquid out through a cloth. Boiling breaks the raft and the whole point is lost.
- Yield and useAt full scale this gives a large quantity of intensely savoury brown liquid, somewhat less than the two gallons that went in after four hours' simmering, and proportionally less at the reduced scale. It is a base, not a sauce for the table — freeze it in ice-cube trays and use it to moisten hash, finish a pan sauce, or set an aspic.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was published while he was ma tre d'h tel at the Waldorf, and it reads like a working document from a large hotel rather than a household manual — hence a "meat gravy" that begins with twelve pounds of meat and a whole fowl. What it describes belongs to the French jus or fond brun tradition, which American hotel kitchens of the 1890s are generally said to have drawn from French practice. The ham rind and quartered onions caramelised down to a glaze do the same work that tomato paste and roasted bones do in a modern brown stock, and the optional clarification with egg white and pounded veal is the standard nineteenth-century method for turning that liquid into the meat jellies and aspics that were then a mark of a serious kitchen.