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Sauce Robert, for Rumps or Steaks

A buttery sauce with onions, flour, gravy, pepper, and salt, simmered and skimmed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sauce Robert, for Rumps or Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Add the sliced onions and fry until brown, but do not let them burn.

  3. Stir in the flour and fry for another minute.

  4. Add the gravy, pepper, and salt, then boil gently for 10 minutes.

  5. Once cooled, skim off the fat.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Butter
Provides fat for frying the onions and adds rich flavor to the sauce.
Sliced onions
Browning adds sweetness and deep savory aroma to the sauce.
Flour
Cooked in the fat, it thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying most of its flavor.

The step that matters

Brown the onions without burning them. Browning the onions builds sweet, savory flavor through the Maillard reaction, but burnt onions turn bitter and spoil the whole sauce.

Swap the onion

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

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

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