Post by BBQ Butcher on Jan 23, 2015 5:25:02 GMT -5
Gravy
People have been cooking meats in various sauces and stocks from very ancient times. Why? The liquid acted as a cooking medium, made tough meat more palatable, and added flavor to the dish. Gravies evolved over time according to ingredient availabilty, local tastes, and traditional cuisine. Some are composed of meat drippings, others from creamy components. Today, gravies are typically used as a cooking medium, thickening agent, and topping. There are hundreds of recipes.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word "gravy" is obscure in origin. It is most likely derived from the Old French word "grane." The earliest printed evidence of this word in our language from the Forme of Curry, an English cookbook circa 1390.
"Gravy. In the British Isles and areas culturally influenced by them, is...well, gravy, a term fully comprehensible to those who use it, but something of a mystery in the rest of the world. Ideally, gravy as made in the British kitchen is composed of residues left in the tin after roasting meat, declazed with good stock, and seasoned carefully. (Many cooks incorporate a spoonful of flour before adding the liquid but this practice is frowned on by purists.) Gravy varies in colour from pale gold-brown to burnt umber, and in thickness from something with little more body than water to a substantial sauce of coating consistency. In French meat cookery, jus is roughly equivalent to honestly made thin gravy in the British tradition...Kitchen tricks involving burnt onions, caramelized sugar, gravy browning', and stock cubes are modern descendants of this practice. Indeed, numerous gravy mixes' or granules' (dehydraged compounds of colouring flavourings, and thickeners) are to be had, for use with the meat residue, or in its stead. Yet in many homes in Britain a true gravy is still made; and this remains the most delicious accompaniement for the meat from which it comes and an essential feature of the meat dish."
---Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 351)
"The gravy that was eaten in the fourteenth century bears little resemblance to the sludgy brown liquid, as likely as not made from stock cubes or freeze-dried gravy granules, usually served up in Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was a sort of sauce or dressing for white meat or fish, and was made from their broth with some sort of thickening agent, typically ground almonds, and spices (the name itself appears to be of Old French origin, coming either from graine, meat', or from grane, an adjective derived from grain in the sense of grain of spice', with in either case a misreading of n for u or v in early manuscripts; the former etymology would relate it to greande or grenadine, now obsolete terms for small stuffed fillets of veal or poultry). The Forme of Cury, a late fourteenth-century cookery book, gives a recipe for oysters in gravy: Shell the blanched oysters, and cooke them in wine and in their own broth; strain the broth through a cloth. Take blanched almonds; grind them and mix them up with the same broth, and mix it with rice flour and put the oysters in. Put in powdered ginger, sugar, mace, and salt.' A more elaborate version of the sauce, known as gravy enforced, was enriched with boiled egg yolks and cheese, while the inferior gravy bastard seems to have been made with breadcrumbs rather than ground almonds. The common denominator between this and what we now call 'gravy' is the juice given off by meat in cooking; and the critical change between obtaining this in the form of broth, from boiling the meat, and in the form of juices produced by roasting, seems to have taken place in the sixteenth century."
---An A-Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford Univeristy Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 148-9)
"Gravy. A sauce, usually flour-based, served with meat, poultry, and other foods...In America "gravy" is a more common term than "sauce" or "sop" (which may indicate a basting sauce) and has been in print since the middle of the nineteeth century. By 1900 the word had metaphoric connotations of money obtained with little or no effort, so that to be on the "gravy train" was to acquire money gratuitiously, often through political graft."
---Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, John F. Mariani [Lebhar-Friedman] 1999 (p. 144)