Sauce Robert (French pronunciation: [sos ʁɔbɛʁ]) is a brown mustard sauce and one of the small sauces, or compound sauces, derived from the classic French demi-glace, which in turn is derived from espagnole sauce, one of the five mother sauces in French cuisine (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, sauce tomate, and hollandaise).[1]
Sauce Robert is made from chopped onions cooked in butter without color, a reduction of white wine, pepper, an addition of demi-glace and is finished with mustard.[2]
It is suited to red meat, specifically pork, typically grilled pork.[3]
History
editSauce Robert is one of the earliest compound sauces on record. Of the 78 compound sauces systematized by Marie-Antoine Carême in the early 19th century, only two—sauce Robert and remoulade—were present in much older cookbooks, such as Massaliot's Le Cuisinier Roial et Bourgeois, from 1691.[4] In Charles Perrault's canonical telling of Sleeping Beauty (1696), the ogress Queen Mother insists that Sleeping Beauty and her children be served to her à la sauce Robert.
A version of sauce Robert also appears in Francois-Pierre de la Varenne's Le Cuisinier François (1651), the founding text of modern French cuisine.[4]
Footnotes
edit- ^ Escoffier, Auguste. The Escoffier Cookbook. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1969. p. 15.
- ^ Saulnier, Louis. Le Répertoire de la Cuisine. 7th Edition. English Edition. Hardcover, printed by Lowe and Brydone, London. No copyright date is listed, book was purchased in 1954. p 23.
- ^ Escoffier, p. 31
- ^ a b Sokolov, Raymond. "The Saucier's Apprentice", A Brief History of French Sauces. pages 5–7. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1976.
