Talk:Brown sauce (meat stock based)

Thoughts on primacy of definition
To be quite honest, I would tend to doubt that most English-speakers outside the British Isles would tend to think of the British sense of "brown sauce" before any other. Native British food simply doesn't have the international influence that French cooking does, making giving the UK version as the primary definition overly UK-centric. Haikupoet 00:30, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Split proposal
At least two distinct meanings here; probably a good idea to split and disambig it.

The question is what we call the separated pages. Something like Brown sauce (French cuisine) would be okay for one, but I think that Brown sauce (British and Irish cuisine) is less satisfactory for the other. It's not exclusively a British thing; similar products are sold in the U.S. The article says "in British and Irish cuisine", but (a) Is it that famous in Ireland? and (b) If it was originally a British product, shouldn't it just be "British"? Otherwise we could slap every country it's sold in into the title (not recommended (^_^) ).

It's probably best to differentiate it without reference to a specific country, but I can't think how.

Fourohfour 10:25, 24 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I do not see a major problem in keeping the article as it is. In my opinion it is not so long as to require a split at the moment.  If one splits it, with the present amount of information both articles would be rather short and rather stub-like.  Alternatively one might disambiguate the two variants, and consider combining the "English/Irish" brown sauce information into the steak sauce article (which does indeed refer to exactly this type of English/Irish/HP sauce).  Additionally one might consider "somehow" combining the "French" sauce and "Danish" sauce information with the gravy article (although I suspect that might raise a couple of hairs, and some discussion).  ???  --SFDan 19:07, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
 * That's a rather tough call. IMHO there really isn't all that much difference between gravy and, say, demi-glace, though the process for making demi-glace or any other brown sauce is far more labor-intensive, enough so that despite the similarities they really are two different things. I do think that a split would be fruitless at this point, as there is rather a lot to say about brown sauces but it would probably wind up being split into a number of small articles. Haikupoet 18:20, 25 November 2006 (UTC)


 * SFDan; although I also dislike splitting related material into fragmented and useless stubs, the point here is that they're essentially two different things that happen to have the same name.


 * I think that the HP sauce material would be better merged with steak sauce, although whether that or "brown sauce" is the more widely-used name is open to question. Fourohfour 13:37, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Sauce or gravy
At the moment, the aricle is pretty much about sauce as a condiment but there is an introduction with the inclusion of French and Danish cuisine of a product more like a gravy. I feel the defininition is the problem, in English cuisine there are several examples of Brown Sauce - Brown Windsor, Brown Butter and Brown Onion to mention a few, but these are 'gravy like' sauces as opposed to the condiment sauces such as HP and Daddies or the American A1. Maybe the Article can be split to give two articles with a disambig link, one for condiment sauces and one for (not really the corect word) gravy type sauces {made in the kitchen rather than bought in a bottle) Geotek 13:16, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Was this meant as part of the "split" discussion above? I've already raised the issue; basically, the article is covering two different things (the thick vinegar-based fruit condiment and the gravy-like sauce) that just happen to have the same name. Thus, there should be at least two different articles.


 * Another issue is that there may be "Brown XXX sauce" gravies in English and related cuisines, but "brown sauce" AFAIK always refers to HP and its clones. Even if this were the case, the article still needs split, and we don't need to use (arguably inaccurate and misleading) national cuisines as part of the title. Fourohfour 13:32, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry Fourohfour, was my long winded and slighty off the main topic way of saying yes I agree with you..... the article needs to be split bfore it gets out of hand, with others adding any shape or form of Brown XXX sauce to the article and it becoming a total mess   Geotek 13:52, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

To complicate things further, whoever wrote the part about the swedish meatballs is unfortunately confusing swedish "brown sauce" with swedish "cream sauce". Brown sauce is much closer to the french/danish sauces described, a brown gravy. This however is not at all the sauce served with swedish meatballs. Meatballs come with a cream sauce. See https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%A4dds%C3%A5s Unfortunately, a large portion of the swedish population also confuses the two (as the saltier, darker brownsauce is falling out of fashion) so I might just be adding to the confusion if I try to correct the article, almost to the point of hypercorrection. Hope someone can add to the discussion!

Date correction needed?
in the British and Irish cuisine section, it states that HP was first made in 1093 I assume this is incorrect (I'm guessing it's 1893) - I havn't changed it because, it may well be 1093... but I'd thought I'd clarify. J.P.Lon 06:27, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Page moved
Someone moved the fruit/vinegar-based "brown sauce" material to Steak sauce. Since I'm not happy with the "other" meaning being the most important default (I don't think either has a concrete case, and many people searching for brown sauce will be expecting HP/Steak sauce anyway), I moved it.

On the other hand "Brown sauce (meat stock based)" isn't a great name, I'll admit. Feel free to move it again (and fix the links), although I recommend against naming it after French/Danish cuisine as this is (a) unwieldy and (b) Assumes that this type of sauce is unique to those cuisines. Fourohfour 17:47, 16 April 2007 (UTC)