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Sauce Robert

A buttery, stock-based sauce with onions, mustard, vinegar, and lemon, served with meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Fry the onions until brown, being careful not to burn them.

  3. Add the flour and shake the onions in it, then fry for a few more minutes.

  4. Stir in the stock and seasonings, then boil gently for 10 minutes.

  5. Skim the sauce.

  6. Add the mustard, vinegar, and lemon juice, then boil once more.

Serve

  1. Serve with steak, pork chops, liver, goose, turkey, etc.

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 + peppertop 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. Lemon + mustardtop 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and onion juices.
Onions
Browned slowly, they add deep savory sweetness and flavor to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying of the onions and adds rich flavor and fat to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances its richness.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that complements the browned onions and meat.

The step that matters

Fry the onions until brown, without burning them. Browning builds the sauce's deep flavor through caramelization, but burnt onions turn bitter and spoil the whole sauce.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Mangofits about as well

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