Gravy
While gravy is almost certainly bad for you and your arteries, its place in slang remains overwhelmingly positive, and even individual people have been hailed as “gravy” (meaning “excellent” or “the best”) since the early 1900s. Given the golden linguistic glow surrounding “gravy” as a slang term, it makes perfect sense to use “It’s all gravy” to mean “Everything is fine.” I personally have never heard the usage, but I think you should popularize it. It’s snappy, intriguing, colorful, and far, far better than the smarmy “It’s all good.”
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Jeff Russell:
December 16th, 2014 at 12:19 pm
The famously overweight US President William Howard Taft not so famously managed to lose significant weight after leaving the White House, by following a diet prescribed by a British doctor. Dr. Blumer. He wrote it out in a letter, and among the things allowed was “gravy, with the fat removed” on his meat. So I am wondering if the 1600s usage survived as late as the early 1900s, at least in Britain, since “gravy, with the fat removed”, makes little sense in the modern usage.
Karen Oliver-Paull:
October 24th, 2019 at 11:26 am
There are two ways of making gravy that I know of, but I am not a chef. However, I have made it both ways since my teens and also lived in the UK for 4 years while in the US Navy. I married a British National and his mother made gravy in the way prescribed by Taft’s doctor as she had severe gall bladder problems and couldn’t eat animal fat. The rue method of mixing flour in with meat dripping and then adding water is what my mother taught me when I was a kid. However, when my dad was diagnosed with high cholesterol, she started making the gravy without fat like my mother-in-law did. This is accomplished by taking the broth of the meat with the fat removed and thickened with corn starch or corn flour as they call it in the UK. It has very few calories, but done correctly can taste marvelous.
Karen Oliver-Paull:
October 24th, 2019 at 11:30 am
Sorry, that should have been roux, not rue. I don’t think you can make gravy from a street.