“Presiding over an establishment like this makes sad havoc with the features, my dear Miss Pecksniffs,” said Mrs. Todgers. “The gravy alone is enough to add twenty years to one’s age. The anxiety of that one item, my dears, keeps the mind continually upon the stretch.”

Without following the worthy landlady further into the depths of her dissertation upon the fondness of commercial gentlemen for the “item,” I would answer a question addressed to me by a correspondent who “believes”—she is so kind as to inform me—“in Common Sense.”

“I notice that many of your made dishes are dependent for savoriness upon ‘a cup of good broth,’ or, ‘half a cup of strong gravy.’ Let me ask, in the spirit of sincere desire for useful information, where is the gravy or broth to come from?”

In return I plagiarize the words of a lady who accomplishes more with less noise and fretting than any other person I ever saw.

“I don’t see how you find time for it all!” exclaimed an admiring visitor.

“I make it, if I can get it in no other way,” was the rejoinder.

Never throw away so much as a teaspoonful of gravy of any kind. Season it rather highly, and set it away in a cool place until it is wanted. For a while you will have some difficulty in impressing the importance of this rule upon your cook, especially if she is allowed to have all the “soap-fat” she can save as one of her “perquisites.” This is a ruinous leak in any household, whether the oleaginous “savings” be exchanged for soap (hard or soft), or for money. It is so easy to “let it go into the fat-crock,” and when the cook is to gain anything for herself by the laisser-aller the temptation is cruelly strong—even if she have a conscience. I have known the pile of unclean fat collected for the soap-man to be swelled not only by the bits of butter left upon the plates after meals, but by quarter and half-pounds abstracted bodily from butter tub or pot, and the abstraction never, in the phraseology of the “conveyer,” to be “scrupled.” “The wise convey it call!” said honest Pistol, and to no other ethical motto has heartier response been made by the comptrollers of culinary treasuries.

In a family of ordinary size nothing should find its way into the buckets of the unsavory caller at basement-door or back-gate. The drippings from most kinds of roast meat, if settled, strained and skimmed, and kept in a clean vessel, answer for many purposes quite as well as butter, and better than lard. Even that from mutton should be “tried out,” strained through muslin, slightly salted, and, if you choose, perfumed with rose-water, in which shape it is better than cold cream, or glycerine for chapped hands, and is a useful cerate for cuts, scratches, etc. The oil-cake should be removed from the top of all gravies before they are used upon the table; for, be it understood, grease is not gravy.

How often I have wished, from the depths of a loathing stomach, that certain well-meaning housekeepers—at whose boards I have sat as guest or boarder—who fry beefsteak in lard, and send ham to table swimming in fat; upon the surface of whose soups float spheroids of oil that encase the spoon with blubber, and coat the lips and tongue of the eater with flaky scales—that these dear souls who believe in “old-fashioned cookery,” understood this simple law of digestive gravity!

A “rich gravy,” or “a strong broth,” is not of necessity, then, one surcharged with fat. Beef-tea—which is the very essence of the meat, and contains more nourishment in small bulk than any other liquid used in the sick-room—should be made of lean, but tender beef, and every particle of suet be removed from the cooled surface before it is re-heated for the patient’s use.

If you have no gravy ready when you wish to prepare ragoÛt, or other dish requiring this ingredient, “make it.” Crack up the bones from which you have cut the flesh, and put them into a saucepan with the refuse bits of meat, gristle, skin, etc.; cover with cold water, and stew very gently until you have extracted all the nourishment, and from two cups of liquid in the pot when the boiling commenced, you have one cup of tolerable gravy. A few minutes of thought and preparation in your kitchen after breakfast will enable you to have anything of this kind in season for a luncheon dish, or an entrÉe at the early dinner. Foresight in these matters is to be forearmed. Teach your cook, furthermore, never to toss “that carcass” of fowl, or the ham, or mutton-bone, “with next to nothing upon it,” to the dogs, or into the scavenger’s barrel. It will not, by itself, make good soup, unless it be very much underdone, and even then the broth will not be equal to that made from raw meat or marrow bones. But, seasoned and thickened—adding sweet herbs and a dash of catsup to the flavoring—it will be useful as gravy in many ways; always remembering that it must be skimmed before it is used. It is also well worth your while to see for yourself, when the meat comes home from market, that it has been properly trimmed for the table. Much goes into the oven or upon the spit to be roasted, or upon the gridiron to be broiled, that is unfit to be eaten after it has been baked or grilled. All bits of tough skin—all gristly portions, soft bones, and the cartilage known as “whitleather” should be removed before cooking from roasts, chops, and steaks, when this can be done without injuring the shape of the meat. The place for these is the stew-pot. Cover them with cold water; put in no seasoning until they have simmered slowly for a long time in a close vessel, and the liquid is reduced to at most one-half of the original quantity; then season, boil up once hard, strain, and set aside until you want to try a receipt in which “a little good gravy” is a desideratum.

If you buy meat for gravy—which you need not do very often, if you (and your cook) are reasonably careful about “scraps,” cooked and raw—get the coarser pieces and marrow-bones pounded to bits. Cut up the meat fine, also. You cannot, by never so long boiling; extract the strength so completely from a solid “chunk” of flesh as from the same quantity shred into strips or cut into dice. It should be reduced to rags for gravies and soups, and invariably put on in cold water. Fast boiling hardens the meat and injures the flavor of the gravy. For the first hour, it should barely simmer. After that, stew very slowly and steadily. The best gravy is like jelly when cold.

Are these details trivial to absurdity? If they seem so to you, pray bear with my over-carefulness when I tell you how ignorant I was of minute economies when I assumed the name, and, so far as I could, the duties of a housewife, and how many others I have seen and talked with who are as anxious as was I, to stop the deadly little drains from the domestic system, yet know not where to begin.