The encyclopaedia of gravy
Assorted gravy facts: the Peep Show sausage theft, the Peter Serafinowicz gravy magazine, the World Gravy Wrestling Championships, and a list of gravy stories that are repeated everywhere and documented nowhere.
Gravy has accumulated a surprising amount of folklore, comedy and sport. This page collects the bits that did not fit anywhere else.
Gravy on television and in film¶
Peep Show: the Cumberland final straw¶
In "Jeremy's Broke" — series 5, episode 3 of Peep Show, first broadcast in 2008 — Mark cooks himself a dinner of Cumberland sausages in onion gravy, and Jeremy helps himself to one.
Mark warns him that taking it would be the final straw. Jeremy takes it anyway, and delivers what is probably the finest line about gravy in British television, in the show's trademark inner monologue:
Mmm, delicious Cumberland final straw, dripping in onion gravy.
The sausage in question is a Cumberland, and the gravy is specifically onion — see onion gravy and best gravy for sausages and mash, which is the correct pairing and, on this evidence, worth stealing for.
Mark, as you might imagine, is outraged.
Gravies of the Ancients¶
The Peter Serafinowicz Show (BBC Two, 2007) ran a sketch built around the peculiar British genre of the partwork-magazine television advert — the ones offering to build your collection issue by issue, starting at 99 pence.
Its contribution to the genre was Gravies of the Ancients, a magazine devoted to the gravies of early history. It appeared in episode 3, first broadcast on 18 October 2007.
📌 Note
For what an actual encyclopaedia of early gravy would contain, see medieval sauces — which covers the bread-and-almond thickened sauces that preceded the roux by several centuries. Gravypedia is, in a sense, the sketch played straight.
I wish I had a copy of that magazine.
Dinnerladies¶
Episode 9, series 2 of the Victoria Wood comedy Dinnerladies, which aired in 2000, was titled 'Gravy'. Tony wants Bren to move to Scotland with him and things are changing in the canteen.
Chicken Run¶
There is a famous line in the 2000 film Chicken Run where one of the chickens, Babs, exclaims: I don't want to be a pie. I don't like gravy in a strong Yorkshire accent.
Later in the film, there is a gravy explosion which happens when the villainous Mrs. Tweedy's massive industrial pie machine is over-pressurised and destroyed. Chickens Ginger and Rocky sabotage the contraption, culminating in Mrs. Tweedy getting trapped upside down in the pressure-cooking gravy tank's safety valve, causing a massive, farm-destroying eruption of hot gravy.
In real life industrial gravy production, I'm not sure there would be a need for such high pressure - but what do I know?!
Gravy as a competitive sport¶
The World Gravy Wrestling Championships have been held annually in the Rossendale valley in Lancashire since 2007 — for most of that time at the Rose 'n' Bowl pub in Stacksteads, and, after outgrowing it, at Bacup Cricket Club. Bouts last two minutes in a shallow pool of gravy, and money raised goes to local charities.
Guinness recognises two records for it: six wins for Joel Hicks, and two each for Emma Slater and Roxy Afzal, the Oxo Fox. See gravy wrestling world records.
Competitors are judged not only on wrestling but on fancy dress and entertainment value, which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone of the event.
The best detail is a technical one. The pool was originally filled with real gravy, made with meat juices and vegetables. It was found to attract wasps. The organisers replaced it with a mixture of cornflour and caramel colouring — which is to say, cornflour and gravy browning, the two things this site recommends for thickening and darkening a gravy when you have nothing else.
Competitive gravy, it turns out, is gravy browning all the way down.
Gravy in the language¶
Gravy train. American railroad slang of the 1920s for a run with good pay and little work. It built on an earlier sense, current from the early 1900s, in which gravy alone meant easy money — profit that arrived without effort, and sometimes without honesty.
It's all gravy. From the same root: gravy as the surplus, the bit you get over and above what you were owed. Something that is all gravy is entirely bonus.
Gravy itself. The word probably entered English through a medieval scribal error, when the Old French grané was misread as gravé and the mistake was copied forward until it stuck. See origins of the word gravy — the most consequential typo in English food writing.
Four stories everybody repeats¶
Gravypedia flags folklore rather than laundering it. These four are all widely told and none is firmly documented.
| The story | The problem |
|---|---|
| Bisto is an acronym of "browns, seasons and thickens in one" | Widely repeated, not firmly established, and told both ways by the company itself. See bisto |
| Red-eye gravy was named when Andrew Jackson asked a hungover cook for gravy "as red as your eyes" | Almost certainly folklore. Two rival explanations are duller and likelier. See red-eye gravy |
| The argyll was named after a Duke of Argyll | Traditionally attributed, documented nowhere especially firmly. See antique gravy jugs |
| A raw potato will draw the salt out of over-salted gravy | Flatly untrue. The potato absorbs salted liquid at the same concentration as everything else, so the ratio is unchanged. See fixing gravy that is too salty |
Gravy by the numbers¶
- 238 tonnes — canned beef with gravy recalled in the United States in 2021 over a spice-mix contamination scare, the largest gravy incident on this site. See the lead-contaminated beef and gravy.
- 150 ml per person — the minimum quantity to make for a roast dinner, and the figure that would have saved KFC some embarrassment in 2018. See the great gravy drought.
- 2.5 kilograms of onions — in a single domestic batch of British curry-house base gravy, which is roughly twenty times what goes into a jug of onion gravy.
- 1908 — Bisto launched, and British gravy stopped requiring a roast. See bisto.
- 1810 — Britain's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House, opened in London. See BIR base gravy.
- 1747 — Hannah Glasse names the Yorkshire pudding, a dish originally served before the meat, with gravy, to fill people up cheaply. See yorkshire pudding gravy.
Regional oddities¶
There is a line across England north of which chips come with gravy as a matter of course, and south of which the suggestion is met with confusion. It runs, very roughly, somewhere below the Midlands, and it is argued about with real feeling. See northern chip-shop gravy tradition.
Poutine has an assembly order, and it is not negotiable: chips, then curds, then gravy poured over the top so its heat melts the cheese. Gravy underneath does not work. See poutine gravy.
Gravy in the American South frequently means a white, milk-based sauce rather than a brown one, which is why "biscuits and gravy" confuses British visitors twice over. See white gravy and gravy for biscuits.
Sources¶
- Peep Show, "Jeremy's Broke" — quotes and the Peep Show Wiki entry on the Cumberland sausage
- The Peter Serafinowicz Show, and a contemporary review of episode 3
- World Gravy Wrestling Championships and the event's own site
- On the origin of "gravy train"