As I lay in bed this morning, my brain was doing push-ups while my body hadn’t even arrived at the gym. “Hey,” said Brain, “what’s the difference between gravy and sauce? How do airplanes stay up? I wonder when Earl will bring Body some coffee. She looks comatose.”
It’s like this every morning, sort of an out of body experience, as my brain’s corporeal container heaves a sigh and wakens and I’m left with eternal questions to ponder. Like gravy and sauce. I rolled over, pushed one leg out from under the covers, decided it wasn’t time to get up, and thought about it. My conclusion was that gravy is made from meat drippings while sauces are made from anything else. Like canned soup, tomatoes and garlic, cheese and pimiento. But I promised Brain I would check this out for validity once Body actually got out of bed.
It was later in the day that I opened my dictionary. Oh sure, maybe a cookbook would have delineated the difference, and maybe a dedicated cook would look there first; but a wordsmith usually consults her dictionary. You learn things beyond cooking that way. For instance, I found the meaning of gravy; and, sure enough, I was right. Gravy, according to Random House Webster’s Unabridged, is ” “the fat and juices that drip from cooking meat, often thickened, seasoned, or flavored . . . ” I felt smug already.
Then I checked the meaning of sauce, to learn that it is “any preparation, usually liquid or semiliquid, eaten as a gravy or as a relish to accompany food.” So I guess this means gravy is a type of sauce, but not the only type. In other words, sauce is more of a generic term, while gravy is a sauce composed of meat drippings.
I also learned the slang usages of each word, something a cookbook probably doesn’t share. Gravy, for instance, refers to “profit or money easily obtained or received unexpectedly,” while sauce can refer to hard liquor as in “He’s on the sauce again.”
I shared all this with Brain with a warning. I’m good at word differences, but I’ll never understand how airplanes stay up. So if Brain wants to be cartwheeling before Body is out of bed, it better ask questions I can answer.
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