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Sauce Robert

A brown onion sauce with butter, flour, beet or veal gravy, mustard, salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 stewpan, brown the diced onions in the butter.

  2. Once they are a deep yellow brown, add the flour and stir.

  3. Pour in the beet or veal gravy and let it simmer for 15 minutes.

  4. Skim the sauce, then season with salt and pepper.

  5. Just before serving, mix in the made 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. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Onions
Browning in butter builds deep, sweet, savory flavour and colour for the sauce.
Butter
Fat that browns the onions and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the gravy.
Beet or veal gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and supplies its meaty flavour.
Made mustard
Adds sharp, tangy flavour that cuts the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Brown the onions to a deep yellow brown. Browning caramelises the onion sugars and develops the savory flavour the whole sauce depends on. Pale onions give a flat, thin taste, while over-dark onions turn bitter.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, flour, veal, 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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