Food for Soul and Body

The word "gravy" deserves the treatment Eskimos give to "snow," needing one hundred terms to do justice to its many variations.

Gravy is that comforting stuff you will ladle over your mashed potatoes this Thanksgiving; the accompaniment to home-fried chicken; the rich juice that cooks out of a ham. Unfortunately, this basic suppertime pleasure mystifies about 50 percent of the cooks in American households, according to a recent survey - a sad state of affairs, as absolutely no substitutes exist for homemade gravy.

If you are among that 50 percent, be not afraid to learn. At worst you'll pour a few cups of broth down the sink if you mess up. At best, people will find your steaming, savory gravy a highlight of the meal. In fact, when there are gravy makings in my house I often eat only potatoes and gravy for dinner.

Ignoring for now the fancy sauces made with a "roux" or with eggs and cream (see Joy of Cooking or another standard cookbook for these methods), I would like to direct you to that most simple, fat-free gravy method - using cornstarch.

Consider the leftover chicken bones, beef trimmings, or vegetable peelings that grace your cutting board. They are treasures. After boiling them to extract their flavor, add salt, a few spices, and a cornstarch/water mixture, and with very little effort you have made a rich-tasting, delicately textured gravy that will moisten and flavor whatever you pour it on - bread stuffing, acorn squash, couscous, etc.

The most important step is creating a rich broth. Do not add too much water when boiling the scraps; usually one cup of water to one cup of bones or vegetable peelings - onion skins, garlic ends, green pepper seeds, broccoli stems - is about right. Most broth needs to simmer at least one hour (cover, so it won't boil away), but vegetable broth takes no more than 10 minutes.

The broth will taste rather flat until you perk it up with a dash of salt, white pepper, powdered onion (I prefer it to sauteed real onion because I don't like lumps in gravy), a minute amount of garlic, and one or two herbs such as rosemary, thyme, parsley, sage, or oregano. Just keep tasting and fixing until that broth makes you smile. It should kick a bit, as the flavor will be thinned out by the food you pour it on.

The cornstarch step is painless. Dissolve two tablespoons of cornstarch into 1/3 cup cold broth or water. If you are making a big pot of gravy, you will need to increase the amount of each. Bring the main broth to a boil, then slowly pour in half the cornstarch mixture, stirring constantly. The gravy will thicken immediately. If it is too thin, add the remaining cornstarch. My preference is for a thin gravy that runs like lava down the slopes of my mashed potatoes.

For special occasions, rescue several tablespoons of the pan drippings from a pork roast, turkey, chicken, or other meat to add to the gravy. While nutritionally naughty, the flavor is marvelous.

Meat eaters do not have a corner on good gravy. If you play hardball with your vegetable broth - aggressively shaking those spice jars - a vegetarian gravy can be surprisingly satisfying. Try it!

Occasionally, I cannot get my broth to taste like anything but watery soup. As a last resort, I hunt down a bouillon cube or powdered chicken soup base to add some foundation. But try not to do this too often, because many brands contain monosodium glutamate (MSG), which causes an allergic reaction in some people.

Use odd ingredients to complement a special broth. Orange juice, raisins, and red wine can be added to salty ham stock (then thickened) to make a dynamite sauce. Brown sugar, vinegar, ketchup, and soy sauce added sparingly to pineapple juice and chicken stock (then thickened) will transform stir-fried vegetables and rice.

Hungry yet? I always am at the thought of gravy. Happy Thanksgiving! ­Carey Burkett

Carey Burkkett, former assistant to the editor at Sojourners, was an organic vegetable farmer in Hallettsville, Texas, when this article appeared.