Gravy

Some get the gravy

And some get the gristle

Some get the marrow bone

And some get nothing

Though there's plenty to spare.

Joni Mitchell: Banquet

For the British, gravy is generally a sauce made from the fat and juices of roasted meat, often with added stock and flour as a thickener. But what people define as ‘gravy’ varies from place to place and from country to country, and the only common denominator is that it is, universally, a sauce. The first records of gravy show that it used to be very different to the sauce you might now slap on your Sunday dinner, though. In the earliest known cookery book in the English language, The Forme of Cury, (The Method of Cooking – cury is derived from Old French queuerie ‘cookery’ rather than an early form of curry), there is a recipe for connynges in grauey, that is, coneys (rabbits) in gravy. However, this 14th-century recipe reveals that the gravy was made of broth, ground almonds, sugar and powdered ginger. Broth and almond milk seem to have been the essential ingredients of gravy in medieval recipes, and spices and ale or wine were also often added. Any sauce that imitated gravy but was lacking in these staples was pithily known as bastard gravy, possibly because it was seen as an inferior condiment, possibly because it combined ingredients that would not usually be found together, such as sweet and savoury, or possibly because it was basted onto whatever meat or fish it accompanied.

The word gravy has an uncertain etymological history. A minority of linguists believe it comes from greaves, the sediment of melted tallow, a.k.a. rendered beef or mutton fat, but most favour the idea that it comes from Old French grané. While the OED states that grané is attested to mean ‘grained, seasoned’, it could also mean ‘from Granada’, a city which was established by the Arabs in their province of Al-Andalus (Andalusia) in the 8th century as  غرناطة (Ġarnāṭa). (The name Ġarnāṭa may come from the Moorish karnattah ‘hill of strangers’ or else from Latin granatum ‘pomegranate’, after the fruit grown in the region or the red colour of the local clay soil.) It is irrefutable that a 13th-century Andalusian cookbook describes a sauce called zîrbâja < Persian zirbaja ‘mixture in a pot’, which bears a striking resemblance to the grauey that appears in The Forme of Cury. Grané certainly appears in Middle English texts with the meaning ‘sauce for meat’, whatever its origins may be. However, English manuscripts tend to have a v or u in place of the French n, so it appears likely that grané was misread as gravé, which then morphed into gravy. Grané is also related to English grain, originally ‘seed’ as well as granary, grenade, garnet, granite and granule on the Latin side, and corn and kernel on the Germanic side, all of which are descendants of the Proto-Indo-European root *gre-no- ‘grain, worn or ground down’, so gravy is very grainy indeed!

As was mentioned above, gravy can be a very different beast when used outside of the UK, though it often does include meat dripping as a principal ingredient. Sawmill gravy, also known as country gravy, cream gravy or white gravy, is a traditional sauce from the Southern USA made from meat dripping and flour combined into a roux, which then has milk or cream added to it to make a kind of meaty bechamel. It’s usually served with biscuits – yes, I think I might pass as well. Even less appetising is bulldog gravy, a food associated with American coal miners during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Basically, this is a mixture of grease from frying sausage or bacon mixed with flour and milk, or even less palatably, water. This unappealing concoction was often eaten with beans or over a ‘water sandwich’ – bread soaked in lard and water. It may have been pretty desperate fare, but at least it was cheap. As Sarah Ogan Gunning sings in her 1937 lament Come All You Coal Miners: ‘I know all about the pinto beans, bulldog gravy and cornbread, and I know how the coal miners work and slave in the coal mines every day for a dollar in the company store, for that is all they pay’. Another gravy variant is red gravy – a simple tomato sauce in Louisiana and a slow-cooked tomato sauce, often with added meat and vegetables, in some Italian-American communities. This will be familiar to fans of The Sopranos, whose characters are happy to munch on ‘macaroni and gravy’, or ‘spaghetti and pasta sauce’, to the rest of us. In India, however, gravy has been borrowed from English and there are a number of different red gravies – sauces for tomato-based curries.

In slang, gravy came to mean ‘good money gained through little effort’ or ‘an unexpected (and usually unmerited) financial windfall’ and riding the gravy train was synonymous with earning a lot of money in exchange for minimal work. This phrase is believed to originate from railroad workers in the USA who were lucky enough to be paid well for a short haul trip, although it was also applied to the directors of Britain’s railway system who were happy to ride the gravy train while their employees laboured away at the hard graft and got their hands dirty. Those whose hard work goes unrewarded when someone else takes the credit for their endeavours are unfortunately never destined to get the gravy. Other phrases involving gravy include the vulgar term baby gravy, which is of seminal importance for the continuation of the human species but not to be mentioned in civilised company, gravy-eyed, a synonym for bleary-eyed and stew in your own gravy, a variation

of stew in your own juices to describe a situation when you are seething with anger and ready to throw the contents of the gravy boat over the head of your antagonist at a family get-together, preferably while it’s still piping hot.