LogFAQs > #980011695

Zareth posted...

Gravy is made out of meat

Specifically, it's made from byproducts of cooking something else. Usually, that means the juices and rendered fat from meat, but you can also make veggie gravy with juices that have come off of veggies. I'd also generally still count it as gravy if you make it by deglazing a pan to dissolve solid bits left behind. The key distinction I would make is that the gravy reuses byproducts from cooking things that are not ingredients in the gravy. If it doesn't reuse byproducts, or those byproducts are from cooking something that's part of the sauce, it's just a sauce.

In that regard, I would say that if you're making your pasta sauce by cooking meatballs in the same pot, then adding your tomatoes and any other veggies to that pot to incorporate the juices/fond from cooking the meatballs, you could call it a gravy. If you're making bolognese sauce and the meat is just getting mixed straight into the sauce, I would not call that gravy. I also wouldn't call a vegetarian sauce gravy because even if the veggies were sauteed first and the resultant flavoured oil/fond were incorporated into the sauce, the veggies are an ingredient in the sauce. If you made, say, eggplant parmagiana and you made your sauce using whatever was left in the pan after frying your eggplant, that could be called gravy, though that's stretching them point a bit because in my experience eggplant doesn't really leave much flavour behind in the pan.

Saying this, apparently some parts of Italy will just call basic tomato sauce a gravy regardless of the nuance of its preparation, so there's precedent for ignoring this distinction. It's also common in Italy to use pasta water in making any pasta sauce, though, and I'd say that qualifies it as gravy under my definition, so maybe it doesn't ignore it after all. I dunno. This just makes enough sense to me to be what I accept as the distinction.