Sunday, December 5, 2010

Lesson #12: Its All Gravy From Here...




After the festivities of last week's Thanksgiving Holiday... I would like to thank the world for the most delicious part of it all....the liquid gold we call GRAVY.

did you know that the origin of the word itself is due to some bad handwriting?  Ahhh yes... someone somewhere was writing something down and someone, someplace else, could not read it correctly.... for those of you that know me and have tried to decipher that which I call my handwriting, this can be a somewhat common thing.  I should have been a doctor.

So the story goes like this....


The first appearance in English of the word gravy was in a cook book.  Way back in 1390 in a recipe for “rabbit in gravy” that reads (now here you need to know that a coney was a “rabbit,” so Coney Island was Rabbit Island)

"Connynges in Grauey - Take Connynges..and drawe hem with a gode broth with almandes blanched and brayed, do therinne suger and powdor gynger"

Sounds pretty yummy (if you can understand it)....But this word... gravy....if we are to understand this recipe correctly, infers that the gravy this rabbit is braising in, is comprised of almonds and powdered ginger..... two things that if mashed into the broth, would, in fact, thicken the liquid to a consistency other than that of water.... think of how so many liquids are thickened other than by roux or cornstarch.... with nuts (as in white gazpacho), with  bread (which is called a Panade), with flour, corn or potato starch (as in the above example of PORK BRAINS IN MILK GRAVY (excuse me, sorry... ummm... I must go vomit now... afterwards, which, I will die of cholesterol from ingesting just 2/3 a cup of it...)

But in this case, unless they had some sort of Archaic Vitamix Blender to puree the mixture to a smooth consistency, this liquid would have been GRAINY.....

Although it appears that the word Gravy has not changed in meaning at all since it first surfaced was before that, a result of poor handwriting, or a bump in the paper being written upon by the quill of a feather...

This was a time before printing presses, which were not invented until 1440 in Germany... so recipes and almost everything else for that matter, were hand written (thankfully not by me or else we would be speaking gibberish) 

Take for instance the eye exam you get at the optometrist.... while it would be fabulous if the first line was in fact "gravy", I’m sure you’ve squinted at a letter or two trying to determine your 20/20 eyesight.... or maybe a doctor’s prescription and wondered “is that an N or a V?”  This must have happened with recipes concerning gravy because the French word was grane, meaning “full of grains,” or “nicely spiced”  
Just like the almondy gingery concoction whose recipe you can follow above (contact me with any questions)



We now know that many English words came to us from French and lots of those appeared in English as a result of the Norman Conquest when the English aristocracy was replaced with an invading French aristocracy  (oh, so long ago in 1066).
French knights sat around living off the fat of the English land and telling their underlings what they wanted for dinner.  So many of the food words we now have in English, a disproportionate number, come from French.... perhaps why some things we eat sound so much more romantic than they really are....

Gravy is one of those words.

So drink up... with your mug held steadily under the gravy fountain and lets give thanks... CHEERS!

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About Me

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Napa Valley, California, United States
I teach Culinary Arts