Other forms: gravies
Gravy is the brown sauce made from meat juices. Poured over a roast, and over the potatoes as well.
It is thickened with flour and stretched with stock, and the argument about how to make it properly is a permanent feature of British kitchens. There is a gravy boat to serve it in. American English uses the word more widely, including for pale sauces served with biscuits. English gets a phrase from it, since the gravy train means a source of easy money, and everything else being gravy means it is a bonus.
1noungravyA sauce made from the juices of cooked meat.
“He poured gravy over the whole plate.”
Gravy may be a scribal slip. One account traces it to grané, a spiced stew, whose n was misread as a v; another takes it from graves, the sediment left behind when tallow is melted.
Middle English
gravey
English, today
gravy
Built from
From Middle English gravey, greavie, gravy; probably from greaves, graves (“the sediment of melted tallow”), or from grave, a claimed misspelling of grané (“stew, spice”), from grain (“spice”). Sense of "pasta sauce" apparently seems to be from Italian dialect, especially Calabrian, differentiating tomato puree (salsa (“sauce”)) from cooked tomato sauce (sugo).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA