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Sauce Robert, or Carriers Sauce

A cold sauce made from onions, ham, butter, consommé, mustard, vinegar, and oil, served with pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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, or Carriers Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the sliced onions, peppercorns, salt, ham, and butter.

  2. Cook over medium heat until the onions are well browned.

  3. Add a little consommé and 1 tablespoon of plain sauce.

  4. Boil the mixture together, then strain it through a fine sieve.

  5. Stir in a little mustard, vinegar, and oil.

Serve

  1. Serve cold in a sauceboat with pork cutlets or cold pork.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sauce + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,120 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Ham + mustardtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together747 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Browning them slowly builds the deep, sweet, savoury base of the sauce.
Butter
Fat that carries the onions and ham while they brown, adding richness.
Plain sauce
Adds body and a rounded savoury backbone to the finished sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp heat and aroma that cut through the richness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances its sweetness.

The step that matters

Browning the onions until well browned. Onions that are only pale give a flat, sweet taste. Deep browning develops the Maillard and caramelised flavours the sauce depends on, but if they burn they turn bitter and spoil the whole batch.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, sauce, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, sauce, mustard, vinegar. 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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