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Sauce Robert

A buttery sauce with onions, flour, gravy, mustard, vinegar, lemon, and pepper, served with steaks or chops.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sauce Robert

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

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

  2. Add the diced 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.

  5. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, skimming as needed.

  6. Stir in the mustard, vinegar and lemon juice.

  7. Do not let the sauce boil again.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce around steaks or chops, garnished 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the onions and flour, adding richness and a rounded flavour to the sauce.
Onions
Browning them adds sweetness and savoury depth to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks briefly in the butter and onions.
Gravy
Provides the main liquid and meaty savoury base of the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that balances the richness of the butter.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and cuts its richness.

The step that matters

Do not let the sauce boil again. Once the sauce is thickened, boiling can break the emulsion and make it grainy or oily, and the acid and mustard added late can turn harsh when overheated.

Swap the onion

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

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

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