What tends to happen is that people will go - they've got hot broth, you know, they've added some liquid to their drippings, they've brought that up to heat. And then they try to add in a big clump of just kind of a handful of flour, and of course, it turns into library paste.

The skin is forming because of proteins, just like if you cook milk or anything else that's got a coagulant protein in it.

What happens is that in each clump you've got the gelatinization of starches, which happens very quickly at the surface of the clump and it kind of forms a protective skin around this dry hunk of flour.

Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it.

Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.

You need to either create a slurry in a cold liquid, which also works with cornstarch, or you've got to do your gravy in a very wide pan and kind of scatter the flour over the top and then very quickly whisk it in.

Gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful.