Making Gravy is an Art, Not a Science

When making gravy from scratch you start with the chicken juice that has come off when cooking. It mixes in with the onion and celery, the two most flavorful and smell educing plants ever used in the kitchen soup stock. They combine with the salt and pepper that didn't quite make it onto the chicken to give you the base of the gravy. Then you warm it up to just below a boil before mixing in the flour (or corn starch to keep it gluten free). Which thickens it up. 

Once it's the right consistency you taste it and then, well then it depends.

Is it bland? Add salt, if that doesn't help then add some butter. Is it too salty? Better to even it out with some heavy cream. Perhaps it's not thick enough, better add more flour. 

See, that's the art of it, knowing what needs to get added or tempered out from a base that will be different every single time, in order to always get to the same ending taste that you crave for. If gravy were a science then it would be exactly the same. The taste when it came off of the chicken would be the same and the same amount of flour would be added and the salt would be perfect every time because it would stick to the chicken just so.

But it's not.

Gravy is a simpler example of every craft, both in its frustrations and it's process. There have been numerous times were I stood there adding different ingredient after different ingredient, knowing that it just didn't taste right but not knowing what to add to make it better. In the exact same way editing involves round upon round of tasting the writing, seeing if the characters work, asking others to try the soup, before realizing that this was the exact taste you were looking for, and the taste that they were looking for, and perhaps people would be willing to buy that alphabet soup.