Sauce Robert
Sauce Robert ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}) 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).<ref>Escoffier, Auguste. The Escoffier Cookbook. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1969. p. 15.</ref>
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.<ref>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.</ref>
It is suited to red meat, specifically pork, typically grilled pork.<ref>Escoffier, p. 31</ref>
HistoryEdit
Sauce 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 François Massialot's Le Cuisinier Roial et Bourgeois, from 1691.<ref name="Sokolov1976">Sokolov, Raymond. "The Saucier's Apprentice", A Brief History of French Sauces. pages 5–7. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1976.</ref> 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.<ref name="Sokolov1976" />