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Sauce Robart for Rumps or Steaks
318. Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into a saucepan, set it over the fire, and when browning throw in a handful of sliced onions cut small; fry them brown, but do not let them burn; add half a spoonful of flour, shake the onions in it and give it another fry; then put four spoonsful of gravy, and some pepper and salt, and boil it gently ten minutes; skim off the fat, and add a tea-spoonful of made mustard, a spoonful of vinegar, and the juice of half a lemon; boil it all, and pour it round the steaks. They should be of a fine yellow brown, and garnished with fried parsley and lemon.
A brown onion-and-mustard sauce of the classic Robert type, built directly in the pan and poured around the meat rather than over it. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is a generous amount for one onion, and the fat is skimmed off later, so do not cut it back much.
- A handful of onionsOne medium onion, finely sliced then chopped small, is about right. Cut them evenly or the thin shreds will scorch before the thicker ones colour.
- "Spoonsful"An unqualified spoon here almost certainly means a tablespoon, since the recipe specifies "tea-spoonful" separately. Four tablespoons of gravy is a very small quantity of liquid by modern habit; expect a thick, relish-like sauce rather than a pourable one, and add stock if you want it looser.
- GravyIn Victorian usage this means strong meat stock or the reduced juices from a roast, not a flour-thickened sauce. Beef stock reduced until it coats a spoon gives the intended body and colour.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard as opposed to dry powder. English mustard is closest to what the writer had; Dijon works and is milder.
- The hingeThe onions must go dark brown without a trace of bitterness, since that browning is the entire flavour base. Keep the heat moderate and stir; if any pieces blacken, start again rather than proceed.
- Acid at the endVinegar and lemon juice go in after the ten-minute simmer and get only a brief boil. Longer cooking dulls the sharpness that distinguishes this sauce from a plain onion gravy.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing, then drained. They must be thoroughly dry first, as wet parsley will spit violently.
- YieldOnly a small quantity, a few tablespoons once the fat is skimmed; enough to pour round two or three steaks.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in the French repertoire, recorded in French cookery by the fifteenth century, and Rabelais mentions it in the sixteenth. Who Robert was is not reliably documented, and the various candidates offered over the centuries are guesswork. The constant elements are onions, mustard and vinegar, and by the time it reached English cookery books under spellings like "Robart" and "Robert" it had settled into a pan sauce for grilled or broiled beef and pork. Its presence here reflects how thoroughly the English kitchen had absorbed a handful of French sauces for plain roast and grilled meat while leaving the names half-anglicised.