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Sauce, Robert
Heat one tablespoon butter in a small saucepan, add five finely chopped shallots, one tablespoon flour, and stir while cooking for five minutes. Pour in two tablespoons vinegar and two light gills demi-glace adding eight finely chopped, sound vinegar pickles, one tablespoon chopped capers, half a teaspoon chopped chives, a teaspoon French mustard and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well, let slowly boil for eight minutes and serve as required.
A short brown sauce built on demi-glace, written for a kitchen that always had a stockpot going. The measurements are Edwardian and the mustard instruction is the one worth changing.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup; "light" appears to signal scant measures, so call it something under a cup. That gives roughly a cup of finished sauce, enough for perhaps four to six servings of pork or grilled meat.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened and glossy. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a heavily reduced homemade brown stock both work; a thin stock will leave the sauce watery no matter how long you boil it, because the flour here is a seasoning-weight thickener, not the main body.
- The flourOne tablespoon of flour cooked five minutes in one tablespoon of butter with five shallots is barely a roux — it is there to bind the shallots and keep them suspended. Keep the heat low enough that the shallots soften without colouring hard, or the sauce turns bitter.
- French mustardDijon, smooth and sharp. Boiling it for eight minutes, as written, cooks out most of the volatile pungency; stir the mustard in at the end, off the heat, and the sauce tastes markedly brighter.
- Vinegar picklesCornichons or small sour gherkins, not sweet pickles. "Sound" means firm and unspoiled. Eight cornichons chopped fine is roughly a quarter cup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon of cayenne is an eighth of a teaspoon. That is enough to be felt in a cup of sauce.
- The vinegar reductionThe vinegar -- the recipe adds the vinegar and the demi-glace together. Reducing the two tablespoons of vinegar down before the demi-glace goes in is a modern refinement that takes the rawness off it; the eight-minute boil will also drive off some acid as it thickens.
- ServingClassic with grilled or roast pork, pork chops and pigs' trotters, and good with any plain grilled meat. Serve hot; it will thicken as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of stock.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in French cooking, traced by most accounts to at least the sixteenth century, though earlier medieval sauces of the name are sometimes claimed. Rabelais refers to it approvingly in the Pantagruel books, and the name is traditionally attributed to a cook said to be called Robert Vinot, though the attribution is a piece of kitchen lore rather than documented fact. In the codified repertoire that Escoffier set down, Robert is onion, white wine, demi-glace and mustard; add chopped gherkins and it becomes sauce Charcuti o, with capes and chives besides. That looseness is characteristic of The International Cook Book, a compilation aimed at giving American households a working sample of the world's cooking rather than at policing French nomenclature, and it takes for granted the one thing a modern home kitchen lacks: a pot of demi-glace standing ready.