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Robert's Sauce
1 cup Spanish Sauce 1 teaspoon mustard 4 tablespoons white wine vinegar 1/2 onion sliced 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon sugar Cook the onion and sugar with the butter until a golden color, add the Spanish Sauce and simmer ten minutes, then add the mustard rubbed smooth with the vinegar, stir till it comes to a boil, strain and serve.
This is the classic French sauce Robert, written in the shorthand of a book that assumes you have already made its foundation sauce. Everything depends on the mustard going in at the very end.
- Mustard last, and barely cookedOnce the mustard goes in, bring the sauce just to a boil and take it off. Held at a simmer, mustard turns harsh and bitter and loses the sharpness that defines this sauce.
- "Spanish Sauce"This is sauce espagnole, the brown stock-based mother sauce thickened with browned flour, given elsewhere in the book. A good demi-glace or a well-reduced brown sauce stands in; a cup is what you need.
- The mustard is powder"Mustard rubbed smooth with the vinegar" means dry mustard powder made into a paste. If you use prepared Dijon instead, use about a tablespoon and cut the vinegar back, since prepared mustard is already acidulated.
- Onion and sugarHalf an onion, sliced thin, cooked in the butter with the sugar until genuinely golden — not brown. This is a light caramelization for sweetness and color.
- Vinegar quantityFour tablespoons of vinegar into one cup of sauce is assertive by modern taste. Start with two tablespoons, taste after the boil, and add the rest if it needs edge.
- StrainingThe recipe strains out the onion. Push the sauce through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle so you keep the body; if you prefer texture, leave the onion in, which is closer to how the sauce is often served now.
- Yield and servingAbout one cup, enough for four portions. Sauce Robert is traditionally a pork sauce.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in French cooking — Rabelais mentions it in the sixteenth century, and it is generally traced, on traditional rather than documented grounds, to a cook named Robert. By the time Escoffier codified the repertoire it had settled into a fixed formula: onion softened in butter, white wine reduced, demi-glace added, mustard stirred in off the heat.