No. 533

Robert Sauce

Sauce a la Robert

Fry slowly in a saucepan two white onions weighing six ounces, and cut into small squares, with two ounces of butter, in such a way that they are half cooked without browning, then drain off the butter, and moisten the onions with two gills of consomme (No. 189), and one gill of white wine; reduce the sauce to a glaze, then moisten once more with three gills of espagnole sauce (No. 414), reduced with one gill of veal blond (No. 423); add a coffeespoonful of sugar, a teaspoonful of vinegar, a tablespoonful of mustard, and a pinch of cayenne; let boil for a few minutes to enable the fat to be skimmed off, and keep the sauce warm in a bain-marie.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic brown sauce built on Ranhofer's house stocks; the work is mostly in what it stands on. With a good reduced veal-based demi-glace substituted for the espagnole and veal blond, it comes together in about half an hour.

Gills and quantitiesA gill is 1/2 cup, so this uses 1 cup consommé, 1/2 cup white wine, 1 1/2 cups espagnole and 1/2 cup veal blond. Six ounces of onion is roughly two small ones, about 1 1/2 cups diced. Expect a yield of about 2 cups of finished sauce.
Espagnole and veal blondEspagnole (No. 414) is the old brown mother sauce: brown roux moistened with veal stock and mirepoix, simmered for hours. Veal blond is a pale, strong veal stock used for reduction. A commercially made or homemade demi-glace, thinned to sauce consistency, stands in for both.
Sweat, do not brownThe hinge of the sauce. Ranhofer wants the onions only half cooked, with no colour at all. Low heat, a lid, and patience.
Draining the butterRanhofer drains the butter off before adding liquid; since the sauce is later boiled and skimmed, this leaves less fat to remove at the end. Tip the pan and spoon it off rather than trying to pour the onions out.
Reduce to a glazeThe consommé and wine should cook down until the pan is nearly dry and the onions are coated in a syrupy film. This concentrates the flavour before the brown sauce goes in; skipping it leaves the sauce thin and winey.
Mustard timingModern practice adds the mustard at the very end, off the heat. Boiled mustard turns bitter and loses its bite, so if you want the sharpness the name implies, stir it in after the skimming and hold the sauce below a simmer.
A coffeespoonfulUsually reckoned smaller than a modern teaspoon, so figure a scant teaspoon of sugar; Ranhofer may, though, be rendering the French cuillerée à café, which is a teaspoon. A white wine vinegar suits it; taste and add more, since the sweet-sour balance is much of the character of the sauce.
Bain-marieA bowl or pan set in hot (not boiling) water. It holds the sauce at serving temperature without reducing it further.
ServingTraditionally sent out with grilled or roast pork — chops, a loin, pig's feet — and with grilled beef. It also suits sausages and any fatty roast that wants acidity.

A Little History

Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in French cookery: Rabelais mentions a "Robert" in the sixteenth century, and medieval French cookery already used onion-and-mustard sauces of the same family. The name is generally traced to a cook called Robert, though no such person is documented, and the attribution is traditional rather than established. By the nineteenth century it had been absorbed into the codified system Carême laid out and Escoffier later trimmed, taking its place as a small compound sauce derived from espagnole — which is exactly where Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, files it here in The Epicurean (1894), among the hot sauces built from the mother sauces earlier in the book. The cross-references to numbered recipes are characteristic: Ranhofer wrote for a professional brigade with stocks already standing on the range, not for a cook starting from nothing.