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Sauce

Robert Sauce

A savory sauce made with onions, veal gravy, mustard, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 503 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Robert Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Dice the onions and fry them until golden brown.

  2. Moisten the onions with spinach sauce or dust with flour and add veal gravy.

  3. Skim the sauce to keep it bright.

  4. Add pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, mix in the 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. Spinach + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together503 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  3. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Onion + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning in the pan builds deep, sweet flavour that gives the sauce its base.
Spinach sauce or flour
Thickens the sauce, giving it body and a smooth, coating texture.
Veal gravy
Supplies liquid and savoury meaty depth to the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp acidity and pungent aroma that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the onions until golden brown. Browning the onions develops sweet, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale onions leave the sauce tasting flat, while over-darkened ones turn bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, veal, pepper, mustard):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, veal, pepper, 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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