The encyclopaedia of gravy
Medieval European sauces were thickened with breadcrumbs, ground almonds or egg yolks and sharpened with vinegar or verjuice. The roux, and therefore gravy as we know it, came later.
The medieval kitchen made a great many sauces, and almost none of them would be recognised as gravy. Understanding why illuminates what gravy actually is.
How they thickened¶
| Thickener | Used for | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Breadcrumbs | Most brown sauces | Soaked, pounded and sieved |
| Ground almonds | Fast-day and luxury dishes | Also made almond milk, used when dairy was forbidden |
| Egg yolks | Pale sauces | Risk of curdling; used off the heat |
| Rice flour | Occasional | An expensive import |
| Blood | Some game sauces | The ancestor of civet and jugged hare |
Flour cooked in fat — the roux — does not appear as a standard technique until the seventeenth century, in French cookery. Its arrival is the single change that separates medieval sauce-making from modern gravy.
How they tasted¶
Sharp and spiced rather than rich. The characteristic medieval flavour combination is acid plus warm spice: vinegar or verjuice (the juice of unripe grapes) with ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, saffron and pepper.
Sauces such as cameline (cinnamon, bread, vinegar) and poivre jaunet (ginger, saffron, vinegar) were served cold or warm alongside roasted meat — closer to a modern chutney or a mustard in function than to gravy.
The dripping pan¶
Meat was roasted on a spit with a dripping pan underneath to catch the fat and juices. That liquid was used — for basting, for moistening bread, for cooking other dishes — but it was not routinely thickened into a sauce for the same meal. The juices and the sauce were separate things.
The eventual merging of the two, when the dripping-pan liquid became the base of the sauce, is what produced pan gravy.
What survived into modern gravy¶
- Deglazing as a gesture, if not a word.
- The sweet-sharp instinct — redcurrant jelly with lamb, cranberry with turkey, the sweet-sour sauces of central Europe. See german and central european gravies.
- Bread as a thickener, still used in German Sauerbraten and in British bread sauce, which sits on the Christmas table beside the gravy as a survival of the older tradition.