I must’ve been nine or ten, doing a community theatre production of “How to Eat Like a Child – And Other Lessons in Not Being a Grown-up.” (To this day, I still find myself mumbling, “Like a child, like a child, like a ch-ch-child,” under my breath like some dormant spell.)
Our director — I remember him as Mr. Matt or Mr. Mark, something with that soft, two-syllable, local-theatre ring — looked exactly how I believed a real director should. He wore black turtlenecks, short-sleeved because it was summer, and kept a stubby, utterly earnest ponytail. He carried a script he was writing in a slim briefcase, which he’d shuttle back and forth from the brand-new Starbucks down the street. And for reasons I still can’t fully articulate, I adored him. Partly because he treated us kids like miniature adults; not prodigies, not pests, just small people doing something brave together.
My first dress rehearsal, however, was a full-body fiasco.
I couldn’t remember my lines. My tongue felt like someone had snuck a paperweight inside it. The childhood lisp I thought I’d outgrown came roaring back like it had been waiting in the wings. And suddenly, the idea of clowning around onstage in front of my dad — the only other man in my orbit who carried a briefcase, but with a far starchier energy — made me feel prickly and hivey, like my nerves were all on the outside of my body.
But afterward, Mr. Matt-or-Mark pulled me aside. He didn’t scold. He didn’t soothe. He just flipped open his script, tapped it with the flat of his hand, and said, “This? All this memorizing, all this work? That’s the meat and potatoes.” Then he smiled, this conspiratorial grown-up smile that made the backstage fluorescents feel warmer.
“Performing it? That’s all gravy.”
I came to adore the phrase, tucking it into my back pocket like a tiny verbal talisman, alongside all the other offbeat, faintly anachronistic sayings I’d collected from the authority figures of my childhood, like the pediatrician who said “cool beans” without irony or the sixth-grade Latin teacher who deemed anything remotely pleasant “swank.” And I was delighted when it would appear in pop culture which, once you start paying attention, is with shocking regularity. (“Succession” even got in on it: Rhea Jarrell memorably says, “My dad worked in an asbestos plant, so it’s all gravy, right?” Later, Shiv repurposes it: “It’s all gravy, baby.”)
This time of year, when gravy boats migrate back to the center of the table and everything smells faintly of butter and bouillon, I find myself thinking about how a simple sauce became shorthand for the good stuff — luck, ease and the little windfalls that make life feel briefly charmed. Gravy wasn’t always metaphorical; it was just dinner. Yet over centuries (and through some delightfully odd turns of slang), it morphed into a catchall for abundance.
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The word itself “gravy” first shows up in English cookbooks in the 14th century, likely born from a scribal mistake: medieval recipe compilers seem to have misread the French word grané (meaning “spiced” or “grainy”) as gravy, and the misspelling stuck, spreading from kitchen to kitchen as a happy accident. For instance, in the 1390 text “The Forme of Cury,” there is a recipe for rabbits and chickens in gravy:
Connyngs in Grauey.
Take connyngs smyte hem to pecys. parboile hem and drawe hem with a gode broth with almands blanched and brayed. do þereinne sugar and powdor gynger and boyle it and the flessh þerewith. flour it with sugar and with powdor gynger and surve forth.
Chykens in Gravel
Take Chykens and surve in the same manner and surve forth.
Basically, the recipe is asking cooks to simmer their rabbit or chicken in its own broth, enrich it with ground almonds, sweeten with sugar and ginger and serve it forth. So, this particular gravy was a lightly sweetened pan sauce — aromatic, comforting and thickened with nuts instead of flour. Over the centuries, gravy shed its sweeter, almond-thickened medieval robes and settled into something recognizably savory, though still wonderfully elastic. Merriam-Webster now defines it simply as a “sauce made from the thickened and seasoned juices of cooked meat,” a tidy description for something that shows up in about a thousand guises on American tables.
And it’s not exactly a puzzle how gravy made the leap from kitchen staple to shorthand for little luxuries. Even in its most literal form, it’s the good stuff — the bonus, the gloss, the part everyone reaches for. I think of Jerry Lewis in the 1950 musical-comedy “At War with the Army,” belting out the eternal grievance: The Navy gets the gravy, but the Army gets the beans…
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It’s a joke, sure, but it also nails the metaphor: gravy is what you get when fortune tips your way; beans are what you settle for when it doesn’t.
By the early 20th century, dictionaries of American slang show gravy drifting from the plate to the pocketbook. Green’s Dictionary of Slang cites a 1917 diary entry: “It wasn’t exactly a ‘gravy’ job.” The “Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang” pushes the origin of gravy as “profit or benefit, especially if unexpectedly or easily obtained” — or as an adjective meaning “easy or cushy” — to decades earlier. Naturally, this brings us to the “gravy train.”
Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t originate in railroad slang. Linguists, including history podcasters Shauna Harrison and Dan Pugh, traced the first known use to a letter in the Unionville Republican of Missouri, Aug. 31, 1898:
…Some of them have humbled themselves before Gov. Shaw and gone to Washington and reported to the Secretary of war that nine-tenths of the boys wanted to go to some of our new possession to do garrison duty. If they had said one-tenth I think they would have come nearer being right. Still we can’t blame them much, for this war is a gravy train for them. They can sit back in their tents and watch the boys work, with 3 or 4 orderlies to wait to on them, and not give them a pleasant look, and at the end of every month take in $300 or $400.
(Though, as writer James Harbeck found, there is a use of the term in a 1910 edition of the “Railway Carmen’s Journal,” in a column dedicated to maintenance contractors, who typically enjoyed easy, well-paying work compared to other railroad employees: “What do you care if someone else is wrestling with a tough proposition. You are all right; you are on the gravy train.”).
These days, riding the gravy train has also picked up some decidedly political undertones.
Alongside calling someone a “dog,” it’s one of those phrases that could comfortably sit on a Donald Trump bingo card. He has repeatedly accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of wanting to “keep the ‘gravy train’ going,” implying Ukraine was taking advantage of U.S. funds and military support. At a 2025 rally in Michigan, he thundered: “We are stopping their gravy train, ending their power trip, and telling thousands of corrupt, incompetent, unnecessary deep state bureaucrats, ‘You’re fired!’”
Trump’s fixation stretches back. At the 45th mile of the New Border Wall in McAllen, Texas, in 2021, he repeated the phrase several times: “And they’re coming because they think that it’s gravy train at the end; it’s going to be a gravy train. Change the name from the ‘caravans,’ which I think we came up with, to the ‘gravy train,’ because that’s what they’re looking for, looking for the gravy.”
Worth noting: the phrase isn’t reserved for the Oval Office. A search of the Archive of Political Emails reveals hundreds of examples, from the predictable to the mildly whimsical, like a 2023 fundraising email from Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, titled “Riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels,” borrowed from the 1996 movie “Kingpin” (alongside so, so many other mentions from the official Tea Party account; they love the phrase).
But the political gravy train is hardly an American exclusive.
In Canada, the late, disgraced Toronto mayor Rob Ford — first elected in 2010 on a cost-cutting platform, then embroiled in a crack cocaine scandal — launched his 2014 reelection bid by promising to “cut the gravy” at city hall. “I pledged to respect taxpayers. I pledged to stop the gravy train. I pledged to stop elites who would take money out of your pocket and put it in theirs,” he declared.
Granted, gravy tastes less sweet when used to rail against bureaucrats. I prefer to think of it being used for the little triumphs: the rush of looking downhill after a steep incline on a bicycle, finding an extra bit of cash after rent is already paid, and the first good performance after bad rehearsal jitters. Still—like at the best table—there’s enough to go around. This season, may its luck, ease and little joys land on yours.
