Gruel & Unusual

Gravy’s such a cinch to make—just meat drippings and a pinch of flour to thicken—you might imagine a caveman concocted it over the communal fire right after rounding out the wheel. But the pan-scraping sauce, particularly creamy white gravy, has had a surprising sojourn throughout Louisiana history.  Along with its cousins, gruel and chocolate gravy, it makes up part of a family of simple, filling foods that anyone can make and nearly everyone enjoys. 

In the mid-1700s, Native American tribes in Louisiana offered a resident Frenchman, Lieutenant Dumont, a similar type of mixture which he described as gruel made from husked maize, water, and oil from bear fat. Dumont, receiving this repast in return for some gifts and trinkets, noted, “The French eat it on salads and also... for making soups.”

White gravy, the broadly Southern staple found blanketing chicken fried steak and biscuits, is a version of a fancier sauce, called Béchamel in honor of French king Louis XIV’s honorary chief steward, but it was actually François de la Varenne, chef de cuisine for Louis XIV’s diplomat Nicolas Chalon du Blé, who gets credit for first concocting it. La Varenne authored the world’s first commercial cookbook, Le Cuisinier François (The French Cook), and the recipe for Béchamel accompanied early French explorers to Louisiana, where meatier variants soon followed; for example, add sausage and you have sawmill gravy. Chipped beef even found its way into the white gravy mixture around World War II as well, with soldiers and sailors dubbing it “SOS” (Save Our Souls or Same Old Slop being the PG-rated translations) when served on a piece of toast. For many years, this entrée was a familiar dish for military personnel.    

White gravy’s distant relative gruel suffers under a stigma. Gruel is typically associated with both the sick and downtrodden; the fact it rhymes with cruel does not help its standing. However, Ursuline nun Marie-Madeleine Hachard excitedly wrote her father in 1727 about the wonderful food in Louisiana. She seemed almost giddy expounding, “We are getting remarkably used to the wild food of this country... rice cooked in milk [gruel] is very common and we eat it often...” In the mid-1700s, Native American tribes in Louisiana offered a resident Frenchman, Lieutenant Dumont, a similar type of mixture which he described as gruel made from husked maize, water, and oil from bear fat. Dumont, receiving this repast in return for some gifts and trinkets, noted, “The French eat it on salads and also... for making soups.” White gravy on a salad is quite a concept!

A century later, gruel was reintroduced to Louisianans via an 1860 marketing surge driven by its supposed medicinal value. Newspapers were saturated with advertisements lauding its “invigorating” qualities. This particular brand of gruel claimed to be helpful to children as well as “highly useful and beneficent to Women in the state of Pregnancy.” During the Civil War, Ransler Wilcox of the 49^th Massachusetts Infantry was stationed in Baton Rouge and jotted in his diary, “I do not feel well... have been to the doctor and got some medicine... gruel for dinner... tea and gruel for supper.” Samuel Haskell of the 30^th Maine Infantry on duty at Morganza wrote, “I have benn sick [and] I dare not eat the rations we draw... [we can get] every thing but flour... I have bought some to make some grewall.” Modern postnatal care research papers have lauded its benefits in artificial infant feeding. Maybe there is something to this aspect of gruel being a cure for your ailments after all.

[Now read: an interview with Tina Antolini, formerly of the Southern Foodways Alliance Gravy podcast]

 Whether a remedy for sickness or not, anyone who has ever read the book or watched one of the numerous movie versions of Charles Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist surely recalls the protagonist uttering the plaintive line about gruel: “Please, sir, I want some more.” One can assume this is the juncture where being orphaned, poor, and homeless became associated with the term gruel. The derogatory meaning associated with the word has even found its way into mainstream media thanks to a statewide sports column. Headlines of a postseason loss for LSU football a few years back opined, “LSU’s holiday bowl gruel typified a mushy season.” 

Another “cousin” of white gravy is the lesser-known chocolate option. In the early 1500s, one of the most prized spoils from the Spanish conquest of the Americas was the secret of the Cacao tree, the seed of which forms the basis for chocolate. This discovery led to the eventual transport of the precious commodity of chocolate to Spanish-held Louisiana in later years. At some point, very possibly along the frontier between Spanish Louisiana and the first-British, then-American-held Tennessee Valley, the chocolate was mixed with other ingredients to formulate a sweetened version of the gravy with the same purpose, poured over pancakes, biscuits, and the like, graually spreading throughout the Upland South. Folks in the Ozark Mountains use this version of gravy nowadays more often than we do.

Ready to add some decadence to dessert or defend gruel’s honor to your shocked dinner guests? Two historically appropriate recipes appear below.

White Gravy

Pour 2 tablespoons of melted butter or meat drippings into a skillet. Add 2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour. Heat and slowly stir contents together. Mix in a ½ cup of water, then blend in a ½ cup of milk. Sprinkle in a ¼ teaspoon of salt, along with a ¼ teaspoon of black pepper or even a pinch of ground Cayenne. If needed, put in a tad bit more milk and heat until boiling.  

Chocolate Gravy

Same as above, cutting the salt and pepper and adding 2 tablespoons of cocoa (or cocoa butter for a lighter gravy),¼ cup of sugar, and ½ teaspoon of vanilla.