Skip to main content
Main

Sauce Robart for Rumps or Steaks

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Robart for Rumps or Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

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

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

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

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

  5. Skim off the fat, then add the mustard, vinegar, and lemon juice.

  6. Boil the sauce again and pour it around the steaks.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish the steaks 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. Pepper + lemontop 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. Mustard + lemontop 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

Butter
Provides fat for frying the onions and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the fat and gravy.
Gravy
Forms the savoury liquid base of the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and a pungent flavour that balances the richness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and fresh citrus flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the onions. Onions must brown without burning. Scorched onions turn bitter and dark, which spoils the flavour of the whole sauce, so keep the heat moderate and watch them closely.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes