Folk around here split about even on whether it's a brown gravy or a white gravy, and if you watch how much you brown the flour you can make it either way - or at least "off-white." The key is that if you don't get all the flour "wetted" in the grease, you can end up with an "uncooked flour" taste that's disagreeable to those accustomed to the regular thing.

There are a few low-grade hash joints around here that use the pre-mix, that you stir into water (not milk) before you heat it, but most of those mixes use a toasted flour in the mix.

If you mix your flour and milk thin enough so that you can simmer it for a while before it clabbers up, you can get rid of the nastiness; but that's way more work than it's worth if you know how to do the quick and easy.

The hardest part of the recipe is that tradition demands that you stir it with a wooden-handled four tine "granny fork" flexible enough to scrape the "bits" off the bottom of the skillet - and it's been twenty years, at least, since the last new one was sold in the U.S.

John