Red Wine Gravy

There's a particular kind of Sunday that asks for this gravy. A cold one, usually. The windows have fogged over from whatever's been in the oven for the last two hours, the roast is resting on a board under its foil tent, and the kitchen smells of beef fat and thyme and something good about to happen. That's when you make a red wine gravy. Not the weeknight kind, spooned from a jug without ceremony, but the kind that earns its place on a table set for people you're glad to feed.

The bones of it are simple. A good wine, reduced hard until the raw edge has blown off and what's left smells dark and slightly jammy. Proper stock, ideally one you made yourself from a carcass and a long afternoon. The sticky brown bits left in the roasting tin, which are not to be wasted or washed away. Shallots softened slowly in butter. A bit of flour to hold it all together. Nothing clever. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract.

The wine matters more than people pretend. Use something you'd drink. Not the dusty bottle at the back of the cupboard marked 'cooking wine,' because there's no such thing. A medium-bodied red with some backbone, a Rhône, a Cotes du Rhône, something honest, will give you more than any specialist ingredient. Cook with the wine you'd pour into your own glass, and pour some into your glass while you're at it. It's Sunday.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I made it properly: 'Wine, stock, time, attention. The rest is just stirring.' Thirty years on, I haven't found a shorter version of the truth.