On gravy

Years ago now, I used to make gravy to go with the Sunday roast. Ideally, one would use the (steel) dish the meat had been roasted in, roux'ing up the fat & other drippings from the roast with some flour and then adding water until you had a gravy of the required consistency. Beef, pork, chicken and turkey behaved well, with it not usually being necessary to add further flavourings; perhaps just a drop of gravy browning for extra colour, with some people liking their gravy quite dark. A catch was that this worked best with a gas cooker, with real flame, with the more usual electric not being quite the same. One might even be reduced to transferring the fat from the roasting dish to a sauce pan, so losing quite a lot of the flavour. But at least the sauce pan was being used for a sauce, as the name would suggest it ought to be. A bigger catch was lamb, mutton or duck - with any of which the above procedure does not work well at all. Don't know why, just that it doesn't.

Part of the ceremony was something called gravy dipping, involving dipping crusts of white bread into the gravy so that one could check how it was getting on. Some of us consumed more gravy in this way than we did on the plate.

Middle of the road eateries have now taken to adding something they call gravy to meals mainly composed of something meaty plus mashed potatoes plus a suggestion of green vegetable - just a suggestion as most people are not very keen on greens. The gravy is usually a rich brown confection, involving, I suspect, sugar as well as flour and is probably not made in a roasting dish. But it does serve to lubricate the rest of the meal - and it also fulfills some of the functions of brown sauce.

The catch is that different people have different ideas about how much is needed - I, for example, like a little, while BH likes a lot - so while the chef might like to arrange the solid food in a very arty way in a large puddle of the stuff in the middle of a large white plate, the customer might prefer to have the gravy served in a jug rather than in a puddle. He or she can then make their own arty arrangement.

Wetherspoons, pretty much the leader of the middle of the road pack these days, knows all about this and their gravy usually comes in a jug. With their Tavistock establishment allowing themselves the variation of a couple of ramekins. Perhaps there had been a run on jugs on the day we visited.

While at Dartington Hall, where you might have thought they were a cut above middle of the road, they serve their hot pork pies, already well flavoured with all kinds of goo, in a soup plate containing a good portion of gravy, rich brown confection variety. Rather too much goo and rather too much flavour all round. Next time I visit, I must remember to ask them to jug the gravy.

This ought not to be a problem as I believe the meal to have been at least assembled on the premises, not just slipped out of a boil in the bag, entire.