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Robert Sauce
No. 1.--Dissolve a piece of butter the size of a walnut in a saucepan, and fry in it two moderate-sized onions finely chopped. When they are lightly coloured, pour over them a wine-glassful of vinegar, and simmer for four minutes. Add an ounce of brown thickening, or, failing this, stir in a table-spoonful of flour, half a pint of broth or water, a tea-spoonful of Bovril, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, and the same of salt. Stir the sauce over the fire for twenty minutes, then add a table-spoonful of French mustard, a tea-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a tea-spoonful of anchovy essence. Mix all well together over the fire, and serve. If French mustard cannot be had, English mustard must be used, but it will not answer the purpose nearly so well. A spoonful of port is sometimes added. No. 2.--The following is a more simple recipe than the above. Slice two onions, and fry them in butter till they begin to turn yellow. Pour over them as much brown gravy as will cover them, add a table-spoonful of mustard, a tea-spoonful of salt, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, and simmer very gently, adding more gravy if necessary till the onions are tender. Rub them through a fine sieve, mix with the pulp some more gravy, say a quarter of a pint, boil once more, and serve. Time to prepare, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A classic brown onion-and-mustard sauce, given here in a full version and a sieved, simpler one. Both hinge on the same point: the mustard goes in at the end, off the boil.
- Add the mustard last, and keep it below a simmerMustard loses its pungency and turns bitter when boiled. The first recipe is right to stir it in after the twenty minutes of cooking; warm it through only. The second recipe's instruction to boil the mustard-laden gravy once more is best ignored — sieve the onions, slacken with gravy, heat gently, and correct the seasoning.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks this is roughly 2 fl oz (about 1/4 cup). Malt or wine vinegar both work; four minutes of simmering is there to blow off the raw harshness.
- Brown thickeningA brown roux made in bulk and kept in a jar — flour cooked in butter until nut-coloured. An ounce is about 2 tablespoons. The fallback of a tablespoon of plain flour stirred into the pan works, but cook it a minute or two in the onion butter first or the sauce tastes pasty.
- BovrilStill sold, and still the closest thing to what the book means: a concentrated beef extract. A teaspoon of beef stock concentrate or a small piece of a stock cube does the same job. It is there for colour and savour, so taste before adding further salt — the teaspoonful of salt in the second version will be too much with a salted stock.
- French mustardDijon, smooth and vinegar-sharp, not the mild sweetened "French mustard" sold in British supermarkets today. The book is correct that English mustard is a poor substitute: it is hotter, more volatile, and dominates the onion.
- Mushroom ketchup and anchovy essenceBoth are still made, though you may need a specialist grocer. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor — Worcestershire sauce is a rougher stand-in. For the anchovy essence, mash a single anchovy fillet to a paste and stir it through; it should not read as fish in the finished sauce.
- Half a pint of brothImperial, so 10 fl oz (about 1 1/4 US cups). The finished sauce should coat a spoon lightly, not cling.
- Yield and servingAbout half a pint of finished sauce, enough for six as the book says. It belongs with grilled or fried pork chops, pork cutlets, or reheated roast meat, and is better made an hour ahead and warmed through.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in French cookery: Rabelais mentions it in the sixteenth century, and it is traditionally said to be named for a cook called Robert Vinot, though the attribution is folklore rather than record. By Carême's and later Escoffier's codification it had settled into a fixed shape — onions sweated in butter, white wine and vinegar reduced, brown sauce (espagnole or demi-glace) added, mustard finished off the heat — and it was classed as a small sauce derived from the brown mother sauce, served almost invariably with pork. What Cassell's shows is the sauce as it arrived in an English middle-class kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century: no espagnole simmered for days, but a jar of ready-made brown thickening, a spoonful of Bovril for depth, and mushroom ketchup and anchovy essence doing the work of a long reduction. The costing of eightpence and the note that English mustard "will not answer the purpose nearly so well" both belong to a book written for cooks who had to account for every ingredient and could not always get the French one.