NEVER Make Gravy From a Packet Again — Try This Old LOGGING CAMP Trick

There's an envelope of gravy mix in your cupboard. A dollar nineteen for two cups, and it comes out thin on one side and lumpy on the other. The cook at the logging camp where I ate for nineteen years made gravy for forty men every morning out of the bacon grease can, a scoop of flour and the water off the potatoes. About eleven cents a pan. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, nineteen of them at the Cranberry camp range. I never cooked there. I paid for it, ate it, and now I've got the cook's ledger and a scale. Camp gravy, weighed: 3 tbsp fat from the bacon can (already paid for by the bacon). 3 tbsp flour ($0.02). Stir in the fat 2 minutes, till it's paper-bag brown. 2 cups cold liquid, a quarter cup at a time, stir smooth each time. Bring to a slow bubble, 2 minutes, till a finger leaves a clean line on the spoon. 1/2 tsp coarse black pepper ($0.02). Taste before any salt. Bacon fat is already salty. All milk: about $0.55 for two cups. The camp way, 1 3/4 cup potato water + 1/4 cup milk: about $0.11. Lumps anyway? Push it through a strainer. Too thick? A splash of milk. Too thin? One more minute. Honest part: this is fat, flour and milk, not health food. If your doctor has you watching fat, that outranks me. No wheat? Cornstarch in cold milk works. No milk? Potato water gravy. Keeps 3 days in the icebox, covered. No fat in the house and cooking for one? The packet's fine. Honest math: all-milk gravy twice a week against the packet is about $66 a year. The potato-water pan is eleven cents. Tell me what's in your cupboard right now, envelope or jar, and what your people called it: sawmill gravy, white gravy, sop. Next week: the can of biscuits, $2.50 for eight. Shorty made eighty every morning, about a nickel apiece. Eat it hot, friend. It keeps you.