Why we name the good things “gravy”

I have to’ve been 9 or ten, doing a group theatre manufacturing of “How to Eat Like a Child – And Other Lessons in Not Being a Grown-up.” (To today, I nonetheless discover myself mumbling, “Like a child, like a child, like a ch-ch-child,” underneath my breath like some dormant spell.)

Our director — I bear in mind him as Mr. Matt or Mr. Mark, one thing with that smooth, two-syllable, local-theatre ring — regarded precisely how I believed an actual director ought to. He wore black turtlenecks, short-sleeved as a result of it was summer season, and stored a stubby, completely earnest ponytail. He carried a script he was writing in a slim briefcase, which he’d shuttle forwards and backwards from the brand-new Starbucks down the road. And for causes I nonetheless can’t absolutely articulate, I adored him. Partly as a result of he handled us children like miniature adults;  not prodigies, not pests, simply small individuals doing one thing courageous collectively.

My first costume rehearsal, nonetheless, was a full-body fiasco.

I couldn’t bear in mind my traces. My tongue felt like somebody had snuck a paperweight inside it. The childhood lisp I assumed I’d outgrown got here roaring again prefer it had been ready within the wings. And abruptly, the concept of clowning round onstage in entrance of my dad — the one different man in my orbit who carried a briefcase, however with a far starchier power — made me really feel prickly and hivey, like my nerves had been all on the surface of my physique.

But afterward, Mr. Matt-or-Mark pulled me apart. He didn’t scold. He didn’t soothe. He simply flipped open his script, tapped it with the flat of his hand, and mentioned, “This? All this memorizing, all this work? That’s the meat and potatoes.” Then he smiled, this conspiratorial grown-up smile that made the backstage fluorescents really feel hotter.

“Performing it? That’s all gravy.”

I got here to adore the phrase, tucking it into my again pocket like a tiny verbal talisman, alongside all the opposite offbeat, faintly anachronistic sayings I’d collected from the authority figures of my childhood, just like the pediatrician who mentioned “cool beans” with out irony or the sixth-grade Latin trainer who deemed something remotely nice “swank.” And I used to be delighted when it will seem in popular culture which, when you begin paying consideration, is with stunning regularity. (“Succession” even obtained in on it: Rhea Jarrell memorably says, “My dad worked in an asbestos plant, so it’s all gravy, right?” Later, Shiv repurposes it: “It’s all gravy, baby.”)

This time of yr, when gravy boats migrate again to the middle of the desk and every part smells faintly of butter and bouillon, I discover myself fascinated by how a easy sauce grew to become shorthand for the good things — luck, ease and the little windfalls that make life really feel briefly charmed. Gravy wasn’t all the time metaphorical; it was simply dinner. Yet over centuries (and thru some delightfully odd turns of slang), it morphed right into a catchall for abundance.

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The phrase itself “gravy” first exhibits up in English cookbooks within the 14th century, probably born from a scribal mistake: medieval recipe compilers appear to have misinterpret the French phrase grané (which means “spiced” or “grainy”) as gravy, and the misspelling caught, spreading from kitchen to kitchen as a contented accident. For occasion, within the 1390 textual content “The Forme of Cury,” there’s a recipe for rabbits and chickens in gravy:

Connyngs in Grauey.

Take connyngs smyte hem to pecys. parboile hem and drawe hem with a gode broth with almands blanched and brayed. do þereinne sugar and powdor gynger and boyle it and the flessh þerewith. flour it with sugar and with powdor gynger and surve forth.

Chykens in Gravel

Take Chykens and surve in the identical method and surve forth.

Basically, the recipe is asking cooks to simmer their rabbit or rooster in its personal broth, enrich it with floor almonds, sweeten with sugar and ginger and serve it forth. So, this specific gravy was a frivolously sweetened pan sauce — fragrant, comforting and thickened with nuts as a substitute of flour. Over the centuries, gravy shed its sweeter, almond-thickened medieval robes and settled into one thing recognizably savory, although nonetheless splendidly elastic. Merriam-Webster now defines it merely as a “sauce made from the thickened and seasoned juices of cooked meat,” a tidy description for one thing that exhibits up in a couple of thousand guises on American tables.

And it’s not precisely a puzzle how gravy made the leap from kitchen staple to shorthand for little luxuries. Even in its most literal type, it’s the good things — the bonus, the gloss, the half everybody reaches for. I consider Jerry Lewis within the 1950 musical-comedy “At War with the Army,” belting out the everlasting grievance: The Navy will get the gravy, however the Army will get the beans…

It’s a joke, certain, but it surely additionally nails the metaphor: gravy is what you get when fortune suggestions your manner; beans are what you accept when it doesn’t.

By the early twentieth century, dictionaries of American slang present gravy drifting from the plate to the pocketbook. Green’s Dictionary of Slang cites a 1917 diary entry: “It wasn’t exactly a ‘gravy’ job.” The “Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang” pushes the origin of gravy as “profit or benefit, especially if unexpectedly or easily obtained” — or as an adjective which means “easy or cushy” — to many years earlier. Naturally, this brings us to the “gravy train.”

Contrary to well-liked perception, it doesn’t originate in railroad slang. Linguists, together with history podcasters Shauna Harrison and Dan Pugh, traced the primary recognized use to a letter within the Unionville Republican of Missouri, Aug. 31, 1898:

…Some of them have humbled themselves earlier than Gov. Shaw and gone to Washington and reported to the Secretary of battle that nine-tenths of the boys wished to go to a few of our new possession to do garrison obligation. If that they had mentioned one-tenth I feel they’d have come nearer being proper. Still we will’t blame them a lot, for this battle is a gravy practice for them. They can sit again of their tents and watch the boys work, with 3 or 4 orderlies to attend to on them, and never give them a pleasing look, and on the finish of each month soak up $300 or $400.

(Though, as author James Harbeck found, there is a use of the time period in a 1910 version of the “Railway Carmen’s Journal,” in a column devoted to upkeep contractors, who usually loved simple, well-paying work in comparison with different railroad staff: “What do you care if someone else is wrestling with a tough proposition. You are all right; you are on the gravy train.”).

These days, using the gravy practice has additionally picked up some decidedly political undertones.

Alongside calling someone a “dog,” it’s a kind of phrases that would comfortably sit on a Donald Trump bingo card. He has repeatedly accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of eager to “keep the ‘gravy train’ going,” implying Ukraine was benefiting from U.S. funds and army assist. At a 2025 rally in Michigan, he thundered: “We are stopping their gravy train, ending their power trip, and telling thousands of corrupt, incompetent, unnecessary deep state bureaucrats, ‘You’re fired!’”

Trump’s fixation stretches again. At the forty fifth mile of the New Border Wall in McAllen, Texas, in 2021, he repeated the phrase a number of occasions: “And they’re coming because they think that it’s gravy train at the end; it’s going to be a gravy train.  Change the name from the ‘caravans,’ which I think we came up with, to the ‘gravy train,’ because that’s what they’re looking for, looking for the gravy.”

Worth noting: the phrase isn’t reserved for the Oval Office. A search of the Archive of Political Emails reveals a whole bunch of examples, from the predictable to the mildly whimsical, like a 2023 fundraising electronic mail from Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, titled “Riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels,” borrowed from the 1996 film “Kingpin” (alongside so, so many different mentions from the official Tea Party account; they love the phrase).

But the political gravy practice is hardly an American unique.

In Canada, the late, disgraced Toronto mayor Rob Ford — first elected in 2010 on a cost-cutting platform, then embroiled in a crack cocaine scandal — launched his 2014 reelection bid by promising to “cut the gravy” at metropolis corridor. “I pledged to respect taxpayers. I pledged to stop the gravy train. I pledged to stop elites who would take money out of your pocket and put it in theirs,” he declared.

Granted, gravy tastes much less candy when used to rail towards bureaucrats. I want to consider it getting used for the little triumphs: the push of trying downhill after a steep incline on a bicycle, discovering an additional bit of money after hire is already paid, and the primary good efficiency after dangerous rehearsal jitters. Still—like at the most effective desk—there’s sufficient to go round. This season, might its luck, ease and little joys land on yours.