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Sauce Robert

A buttery, onion-based sauce with stock, mustard, vinegar, and lemon, served with meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sauce Robert

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Fry the onions until brown, being careful not to burn them.

  3. Add the flour and shake the onions in it, frying for a few more minutes.

  4. Stir in the stock and seasonings, and boil gently for 10 minutes. Skim the surface.

  5. Add the mustard, vinegar, and lemon juice. Boil once more and serve with steak, pork chops, liver, goose, turkey, etc.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning in the butter builds the sweet, deep flavour that the sauce is based on.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly bound sauce as it cooks with the onions.
Butter
Carries the frying and adds richness to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the butter and onions.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent note that lifts the savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until brown. Onions that are browned rather than burnt give a sweet, deep, savoury flavour. Burnt onions turn bitter and taint the whole sauce, so they need steady heat and close attention.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, mustard, vinegar, pepper, flour):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, mustard, vinegar, pepper, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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