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Sauce

Sauce Robert

A buttery sauce with onions, ham, broth, lemon juice, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sauce Robert

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, melt ¼ pound of butter with 1 tablespoon of flour until it turns a fine brown color.

  2. Add the minced onions and ham, along with another tablespoon of butter and a little broth or warm water.

  3. Skim the sauce well and let it simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  4. Before serving, stir in 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar and 1 teaspoon of mustard.

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

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

  2. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Ham + mustardtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together747 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Browned with the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding body and flavor to the sauce.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. Cooking the butter and flour to a fine brown builds a nutty, deeper flavor and color in the roux. Taking it too far can taste bitter, and stopping too early leaves the sauce pale and flat.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, onion, ham, mustard. 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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