How UK’s Indian restaurants got on the gravy train
The value of Thanksgiving gravy is shown in the FRIENDS TV serial episode ‘The One with Ross’s Sandwich’. The sandwich is made with what an obsessed Ross rather grossly calls the ‘moistmaker’, a slice of bread soaked in leftover gravy. It acknowledges that bread and gravy are natural partners, as the Old Foodie’s blog notes in a recipe for ‘Gravy-bread for invalids’ from an 1859 English cookery book.
This is made by cutting a roast, inserting a slice of bread to soak up some juices and then serving the soggy result to the sick person.
Gravy is an English obsession. In its essence, it is the fatty juices from roast meats that are thickened by being cooked with some kind of starch. But from the 16th century, it started being distinguished from sauces, which were made from other ingredients artfully combined, whereas gravy was simply generated from the same roast with which it was served.
This fit in with the British propaganda that their prosperity was shown by the large amounts of meat they ate, simply served with self-generated gravy, whereas Europeans had to make do with less meat and more vegetables, whose poverty was covered up by separately made sauces. Gravy was proudly served up at the table in long shallow silver jugs called gravy-boats.
This distinction was always rather false. Some of the most famous French sauces are made with juices from the meat they are served with.
There is a bizarre piece of restaurant equipment that crushes the carcasses of roast ducks to extract their juices that are then made into a gravy in front of the diners. Meanwhile, British cooks often made extra gravy from pieces of meat that weren’t worth roasting.
Americans would take gravy in completely unexpected directions, like the
