Chocolate Gravy

Hi, welcome to A Way with Words.

This is Shelly from San Antonio.

Hi, Shelly. How are you doing?

I’m doing great. I was calling to talk to you about chocolate gravy.

Oh, yes, please.

Tell me more about chocolate gravy.

I grew up in southwestern Missouri, and it seems to be mostly in that regional area of those four states, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, and the Ozarks. And it’s kind of a chocolate pudding you put over bread for breakfast. My dad used to eat it with bacon, and oh, what a wonderful combination. And I’m wondering if you know anything about it or if you’d like to hear more about it.

I’ve never heard of it.

I have probably 50% of my body weight comes from what we called cocoa gravy in my house.

Really?

Yes. My father’s people are from southeast Missouri, which is not far from what you’re talking about. And I believe that my mother learned the recipe from my father’s mother, so from my grandmother. And I have eaten cocoa gravy with biscuits so many times I could not even tell you. It is the best thing ever. And it’s more liquid in our house. It’s hot, steaming, poured over the top of fresh buttered biscuits. It’s so good and so bad for you.

We ate it more with yeast bread and a little bit thicker than a liquid. And my great-grandmother was literally on the covered wagon coming over from the east. And she told me that she and her family would eat it on their trip because cocoa doesn’t go rancid. The rats won’t eat it. And typically when they arrived at their settlement home, it was one of the few staples they had left.

Huh, interesting.

But what about the sugar that you need to make it work? Wouldn’t that spoil or get eaten?

Yeah, well, she was also one of those people who could use things out of the garden and in the forest. And she would find elderberry leaves and she would crush those into a sweetener.

Okay.

So I would assume that perhaps if they were out of sugar, she might be able to make the chocolate gravy with it. Figure it out, right? Add some sweetener somehow.

Yeah, exactly. One of my favorite things growing up, my mother always made good biscuits. Both my parents do great, good Midwestern cooking, but big piles of steamy biscuits and a cocoa gravy in a pot. And, oh, so good. And my mother’s made it. I have never made it for my son. I’m not sure he would eat it. But, man.

Are you kidding? My son is 11, and any special occasion, like his birthday or a Thursday, he will ask me to make it. And any time we have company. It’s like a family tradition that makes you just feel like you’re really bonded together by all that chocolate in the morning.

Oh, nice.

You really do need to make it for your little one.

I’m going to do it. I frequently make biscuits on the weekend, and I will do cocoa gravy the very next time.

Hey, y’all, I feel deprived here because I never had that growing up, and gravy to me was something completely different. I mean, I’m interested in the use of, yeah, yeah, gravy was always meat-based when I was growing up, either red-eye gravy or just gravy with flour in it.

Yeah. I think the reason we call it gravy is only because you serve it over, pour it over the bread like a gravy. It’s really more like a pudding. Would you like me to give you a quick recipe?

Oh, yes, please.

It’s four simple ingredients. It’s a cup of sugar, a third cup of flour, a third cup of cocoa. You put those three in the bottom of a pot and you mix them up with a wooden spoon. And that crunchy, gravelly sound of those mixing together is part of the experience. It’s a Pavlovian experience, actually. It makes all the kids come running because they know what’s coming.

Then you throw in two cups of milk and you stir it on the stove and you can’t quit stirring once it gets started. And as soon as it barely gets to a boiling stage, you take it off and let it cool. And here are the directions my great-grandmother wrote down. She said you pour in the milk and simmer, vanilla to taste, a pinch of salt on a rainy day. A pinch of salt on a rainy day.

Very similar to my mother’s recipe. I really love the linguistic component of this as well as the food component. The linguistic component in the way is how is this a gravy? But the food component is like yum. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, gravy is a term for sweet sauce used as topping chiefly in the Northeast.

Oh, interesting.

So it’s more widespread maybe than—

I bet we’ll hear from all over about people who have cocoa gravy or chocolate gravy. Really interesting.

Right.

Thank you so very much, Shelley.

Yeah, thank you guys for your time. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So I’m going to put my mom’s recipe for cocoa gravy on the website.

Nice.

And everybody can try this out.

Nice.

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