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Pork, Loin of, with Sauce Robert
Roast a loin of pork in the usual way, baste liberally, and when done enough serve on a hot dish with a sauce prepared as follows poured round it. Cut four good-sized onions into small pieces, fry them in two ounces of butter until they are lightly browned. Sprinkle an ounce of flour over them, and stir them about with a wooden spoon over a gentle fire for two minutes. Add a little salt and pepper, a pint of stock, and a tea-spoonful of Bovril, and let the sauce simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, stirring it all the time. Pour it on a hot dish, lay the joint upon it, and serve immediately. Send apple sauce to table in a tureen. A little made mustard may be added to the sauce, if liked. Loin of pork, when served with this sauce, is sometimes stewed instead of being roasted. To do this, put the joint with a small portion of clarified butter into a stewpan just large enough to hold it. Let it brown brightly on both sides, then pour over it as much stock as will cover it, and add a bunch of sweet herbs, an onion stuck with two cloves, a little salt and pepper, and a glass of light wine; let it simmer gently for two hours, and baste two or three times at intervals during the cooking. Serve the pork on a hot dish with the sauce poured round it. Time to roast a loin weighing about four pounds, one hour and a quarter. Probable cost, 9 1/2d. to 10 1/2d. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A late-Victorian roast with one of the oldest sauces in the French repertoire, given here in a shortcut version built on beef extract rather than a proper demi-glace. Most of the work is in the onions.
- Brown the onions properlyThe sauce lives or dies on the onions: they want a genuine even browning in the butter, not just softening, before the flour goes in. Rushed pale onions give a sauce that tastes of raw flour and stock, and the two minutes of stirring after the flour is the minimum, not a formality.
- Bovril and what to use insteadBovril is a salty beef extract, still sold in Britain but not everywhere. Half a teaspoon of a concentrated beef stock paste or a good bouillon concentrate does the same job; add it late and taste before any further salt, since these products are aggressively seasoned.
- A pint, imperialCassell's pint is 20 fluid ounces, so about 2 1/2 US cups of stock. Fifteen minutes of gentle simmering will reduce it to a pouring sauce; if it is still thin, keep going rather than adding more flour.
- Made mustard"A little made mustard" means prepared mustard, not powder. It is worth adding — mustard is part of the classical identity of Sauce Robert — but stir it in off the heat at the end, as boiling flattens its sharpness.
- Oven and internal temperatureThe book gives no oven temperature, only 'in the usual way'; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, will suit the stated hour and a quarter for a 4 lb loin. Go by a thermometer: 145F at the centre, then rest 10 minutes. Victorian kitchens had no thermometers and pork was habitually cooked well past that point, which is much of why loin got its reputation for dryness.
- The stewed versionTwo hours of gentle simmering suits a shoulder or a rolled belly; a lean modern loin will be stringy long before that. If you want the braise, use a fattier cut, or cut the loin's time to the point where it reaches 145F and finish reducing the liquid separately.
- Clarified butterSpecified for the braise because whole butter burns at browning heat. Ghee or a neutral oil does the same work if you are not clarifying butter yourself.
- ServingThe joint is set on top of the sauce rather than napped, so both dish and sauce need to be properly hot. Apple sauce goes separately in a tureen. Five or six servings, as stated.
Sauce Robert is among the oldest named sauces in French cookery — a version appears in the medieval Viandier tradition, and Rabelais jokes about its inventor, so its origins are usually described as traditional rather than documented. By Escoffier's day it was codified as a demi-glace with browned onion, white wine and mustard, served characteristically with pork. Cassell's offers a household shortcut: onions, a blond roux, stock and a spoonful of Bovril standing in for the long-simmered brown sauce that a professional kitchen would have had on hand. The substitution suggests a fairly late date for the entry, since the product was launched as Johnston's Fluid Beef in the 1870s and only took the name Bovril in 1886; its appearance in a domestic dictionary of cookery suggests branded meat extracts had by then become an acceptable kitchen ingredient in Britain. The apple sauce sent separately in a tureen is the English contribution, welded onto a French sauce without apology.