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Sauce Robert, for Rumps or Steaks

A brown sauce made with butter, onions, flour, gravy, pepper, salt, mustard, vinegar, lemon, and garnished with fried parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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, for Rumps or Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onions and fry until browned.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the onions and fry again.

  4. Pour in the gravy, add pepper and salt, and let it boil gently for 10 minutes.

  5. Strain off the fat, then stir in mustard, vinegar, and lemon juice.

  6. Boil the mixture and pour it around the steaks.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with fried parsley and lemon.

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. Pepper + lemontop 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. Pepper + mustardtop 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

Butter
Provides fat for frying the onions and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Onions
Browning them builds deep, savoury flavour and sweetness in the sauce.
Flour
Cooked with the fat, it thickens the gravy into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding meaty savour and body.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Fry the flour with the onions. Cooking flour in fat until it is lightly browned removes its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. Stirring constantly prevents lumps and scorching.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, flour, pepper, mustard, vinegar, lemon. 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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