Gravy - Artform and Austerity Weapon

At first blush there is nothing austere about a rolled rib of beef joint that cost £25. And very delicious it was too. But the gravy that accompanied it is another matter.

Our national inferiority complex about food has, happily, been weakened over the last two or three decades. We still tend to think though of e.g. French sauces as things of artistic beauty, and dismiss gravy as very basic and unworthy of consideration. Nonsense, a well made gravy is a joy. It lifts the potatoes that go with a roast, and moistens the meat if it needs that treatment. Given the basis is what you scrape off the roasting dish it gladdens the austerity heart too.

I cheat a bit, using a tsp of Bovril to add extra meatiness. Yesterday's version had a cm of white wine left from the previous day to loosen the thickened juices and de-glaze the dish, then some vegetable water, and included a finely chopped shallot for some texture. For me, though the meat was very good (farm shop, a proper mature brown not pink), the gravy and mash were the best bit of the meal.

Later in the week I'm going to do bangers and mash. Again a gravy will make the thing moist and interesting, and as it will be onion gravy an extra vegetable will be smuggled in - my onion gravy involves very slow melting of four or five finely chopped onions until they start to caramelise. It takes a good 25 minutes or more, but it's worth the wait. Thickened thereafter with plain flour, then made into a luscious liquid with potato water and that magical tsp of Bovril added to give extra flavour, it's not far off very thick French onion soup by the end.

Six fat 'taste the difference' sausages from Sainsbury's cost £2 the other day; spuds for the mash maybe 50p; onions 25p; with in all likelihood peas and steamed carrots for more veg the lot will come to at most £3.25 for three of us. Which makes £25 for the beef joint a little less painful (though it must be said the leftover meat will make hot beef sandwiches tonight - my own bread, some lettuce and cucumber piled on top, thin raw onion rings, and a knife full of mustard). And just one slice saved for another day will make a starter of lentil and beef salad with gherkin and raw onion chopped in, so the £25 does stretch to three meals).

Re-Train Your Gravy

Too convoluted a title?

A simple idea for using up surplus gravy - so about 12 million households currently then - beyond the traditional moistening of turkey sarnies.

On the 20th we committed a major sin against the austerity cannon by buying in Chinese - I can blame my visiting father whose idea it was. The next day, though we had imbibed very modestly, both my wife and I felt headachey, maybe the MSG at fault. So we prefer homemade, and a soup should always be part of any Chinese banquet (when you attend posh ones you get several), thus on the 27th I made the following as part of a full Chinese meal.

I had half a gravy-boat of beefy goodness from Christmas Day (as we had a small piece of sirloin to go with the turkey crown). A chopped onion and finely diced carrot were fried until the onion was taking on a hint of colour, then a huge clove of garlic in the thinnest slices was added along with a de-seeded chili, and the gravy poured over the lot. Topped up with water and spiced with plenty of star anise and 5-spice the soup was simmered for 20 minutes, then a handful of sirloin in cubes and the same amount of sweetcorn kernels dropped in, and finally some pre-soaked noodles.

It's a recipe with endless variations possible, but the core of the thing is the affinity of beef and star anise.

Ah! Sugar Sugar

Sugar, especially white sugar, has become one of the pariahs of contemporary food. We have various plant extracts and chemical substitutes offered in place of it; warnings about the damage it does to our teeth and our overall health; chefs finding ways to avoid it. This is very different from the way cooks a few centuries ago looked upon what was then a luxury item. And to me it seems as with so much in life moderation is the key rather than abstinence; and as a natural product I have more confidence in sugar than most alternatives, just as I prefer butter to processed spreads.

This thought came from reading Gervase Markham. I have doubts about his real culinary knowledge. Some of his pronouncements don't make much sense, but he like Elinor Fettiplace regularly used sugar as a spice, to perk up sauces, gravies, to prettify dishes and to correct seasoning generally. It remains a valid and cheap way of improving flavour - sweet after all is one of the basic tastes. Thus a spoon of sugar in a simple spaghetti sauce rounds it out, bringing the flavour of tomatoes to the fore. It doesn't hurt in many beefy or porky stews either.

I'm not advocating sugar butties or loading the stuff into everything as old Gervase seemed to wish, but it is not something we can afford to consign to the outer reaches because of fashion and our fears about obesity.

Star Star Anise

Home-made Chinese food too often focuses on stir fries to the exclusion of many more interesting methods and recipes. In my past life I got to travel in China, Taiwan and various Asian countries where the Chinese tended to dominate business (as they soon will around the world). A frequent favourite dish on those travels was variations on beef soup flavoured with star anise, the best being made with oxtail.

I have since found that a passable imitation can be made with leftover beef gravy (real gravy, not the stuff made with powder) or the juices from a beef stew. On Saturday we had one such, started as ever with a gently fried chopped onion, to which a finely chopped red chilli was added before the sieved juices of a stew from two days earlier were poured in and two whole star anise and a couple of big chunks of ginger were plopped in to simmer nicely for the best part of an hour (the few scraps of meat added at the last minute to avoid them going stringy along with a ready softened nest of noodles).

Not haute cuisine, but a good element of a Chinese meal that had the twin virtues of tasting great and costing next to nothing. Made with leftovers but there were no leftovers afterwards this time.