Of Unknown Origin: Sauce Robert

In the summer of 1969, I decided to leave college for a while and pursue other activities. To make a living, I worked as a draftsman for an architectural and engineering consulting firm. One of the engineers I worked with, Larry, became a close friend. I’d spend my off hours at his house enjoying many glasses of wine, watching sports on television, and listening to opera—all at the same time. One week, he and his wife made a beef burgundy stew that took them two days to prepare and me two minutes to devour. I wasn’t doing any serious cooking in those days and I didn’t consider recreating what, at the time, was the best stew I had ever eaten. (It was certainly much better than the bowls of tough, grayish meat chunks suitable for a Dickens novel that I cooked in Boy Scouts. That was called stew, too.) I did make a mental note of the source of the recipe—a cookbook by a lady with a high, squeaky voice who was then on television. She called her program The French Chef.

Jump forward in time about fifteen years. While searching through used-book stores for Chinese cookbooks, my interest at the time, I decided to spend $13.50 on a used copy of the 23rd printing of the 1973 edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.1 This is the cookbook with the beef stew I had loved on that single occasion years earlier. Only then did I find out the name was really bœuf bourguignon. I prepared the recipe once or twice, but I made so many modifications that my version barely resembled the original. And I don’t think it tasted as good as I remembered. But now I had my first French cookbook—which, I was to learn years later, was really designed, when it was first published in 1961, for an American audience as an introduction to cooking “authentic” French-style food using locally available ingredients.2

One evening, some time later, I needed a sauce for some meat I was cooking. I don’t remember exactly how much later or what the meat was. I searched through a number of cookbooks but decided to try a sauce from that “French” cookbook out of which I had cooked only the bœuf bourguignon until then. I chose a brown mustard sauce called sauce Robert. It tasted pretty good, so I made it a few more times. But when I started to cook French food seriously a few years later, the recipe for sauce Robert didn’t make the move from my binder of miscellaneous recipes to my binder of French recipes.

I didn’t think much more about sauce Robert during that period. I was busy learning all sorts of new recipes from my various French sources. In 1999, I purchased the millennium edition of the Larousse Gastronomique.3 While thumbing through all 1215 pages of this massive tome the evening that it was delivered to my house, I ran across a version of sauce Robert that looked worthwhile. Indeed, it was. Here was a sauce worth making over and over again. I later published my re-creation of the recipe in my first article on sauces, in January 2002.4

When I published that sauce Robert recipe, I already was aware of the fact that the sauce had a history several centuries old. I enjoyed telling dinner guests that the original recipe had its roots in the 16th century, although I had read only one reference telling me so. Later, when I was researching the history of blanc manger5 in 2004, I noticed that sauce Robert kept showing up in the sources I was gathering on that subject. While I was spending most of my effort to learn about blanc manger, each time sauce Robert appeared in a reference I made a note to go back to it later.

Besides providing a recipe for sauce Robert, the Larousse Gastronomique also includes this short two lines: “The name of a sauce based on white wine, vinegar, and mustard. It is a classic accompaniment to pork chops and other grilled meats.” But there is nothing about who Robert was. In the previous French-language edition,6 the description is much longer. To the first two sentences is added: “It is wrongly attributed to a certain Robert Vinot, a cook from the end of the 16th century, but Rabelais, in le Quart Livre [1552], mentioned ‘Robert, inventor of sauce Robert, a healthy and necessary addition to roast rabbit, duck, fresh pork, poached eggs, salt cod, and many other meats.’ Besides, le Grand Cuisine (1583) mentions a sauce Barbe Robert, the recipe having been previously published in Viandier7 as ‘taillemaslée’ (fried onions, verjuice, vinegar, and mustard) for roast rabbit, fried fish, and fried eggs.” The first edition of the Larousse Gastronomique, written about 50 years earlier, states that sauce Robert “was invented by a certain Robert Vinot, who, according to the legend on a print which bears his portrait, was a celebrated sauce maker at the beginning of the seventeenth century.”8

The Rabelais quote is taken almost word for word from Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française, originally published in 1859 and 1872.9^,10 The version of the Viandier mentioned is a manuscript in possession of the Vatican that is believed to have been scribed in the first half of the 15th century. Taillevent, the supposed author, is believed to have died in 1395—long before Robert Vinot is believed to have lived.

(Allow me a personal observation: it seems to me that most French dishes named after individuals, at least when the individual is a man, use the family name in the title rather than the given name, unless the honoree is of royalty and goes by one name only. There are exceptions, but these seem to be rare.)

Although sauce Robert is my favorite sauce, apparently that’s not the case with anyone else. I can’t remember ever seeing the sauce listed on a menu. When I brought up the subject with a couple of chef-friends of mine in France, they hadn’t heard of sauce Robert. And I’ve gone through my modern French cookbooks without finding a single recipe for sauce Robert, except in the books already mentioned. But it wasn’t always this way.

As I’ve mentioned, there is one recipe for sauce Robert in the most recent Larousse Gastronomique. So let’s use this recipe as a baseline and look back in history to see how recipes for the sauce have evolved. Here it is:

Dorer dans 25 g de beurre 2 oignons hachés finement. Ajouter 2 dl de vin blanc et 1 dl de vinaigre, et faire réduire presque à sec. Ajouter 1/2 litre de sauce espagnole ou de demi-glace. Rectifier l’assaisonnement. Délayer 1 grosse cuillerée à soupe de moutarde blanche avec un peu de sauce, puis, hors du feu, l’ajouter au reste de la sauce et bien mélanger. Tamponner.11

Lightly brown 2 finely chopped onions in 25 g butter. Add 2 dl white wine and 1 dl vinegar. Reduce until almost dry. Add 1/2 liter of espagnole sauce12 or demi-glace. Taste for salt and add some if necessary. Dissolve 1 large tablespoon plain mustard in a little of the sauce. Then, off the heat, combine this with the remainder of the sauce and mix well. Strain.

The 1936 edition of the Larousse Gastronomique lists three separate recipes for sauce Robert.13 The first is similar to the one above except it uses significantly less onion and no vinegar. The second one browns the onion with some flour, moistens it with white wine and stock, and finishes the sauce with a little mustard. The third recipe is simply a translation of Carême’s recipe from the first half of the 19th century—but we’ll get to that one later.

Ali-Bab’s sauce Robert from the 1920s comes in three varieties. One he suggests for pig’s feet, the second he offers for pork tenderloins, and the last, which is given in a parenthetical note, is a Lenten version for use with fish. The first is the simplest.

Pour préparer la sauce Robert, faites fondre dans du beurre des oignons coupés en rondelles, sans les laisser roussir ; mouillez avec un bon jus corsé par de la glace de viande ; faites réduire ; puis relevez la sauce avec poivre et finissez-la avec de la moutarde. Passez-la.14

To prepare sauce Robert, cook sliced onions in melted butter without allowing them to brown. Moisten the onions with a full-flavored meat glace. Season the sauce with pepper and finish it with mustard. Strain.

Ali-Bab’s second recipe includes a bit more detail.Wine is added to the cooked onions and then reduced, as in the recipes from other sources. Demi-glace is added instead of glace, and the sauce is simmered for half an hour. It is then strained before seasoning with cayenne or paprika, and mustard is added.15 For the Lenten version, fish stock is substituted for the demi-glace.16

Escoffier’s recipe for sauce Robert in Le guide culinaire is essentially the same as Ali-Bab’s second version, except that after straining, the sauce is finished with a little sugar, which replaces the pepper. English (dry) mustard, dissolved in a little water, is substituted for the prepared mustard.17 Both authors prepare their version without vinegar.

Victorian author Emilie Lebour-Fawsett provides a recipe as part of her 33rd “lecture.” Hers is quite different from others in that sliced onions are first washed to reduce their bitterness and then cooked, covered, until very soft. Flour is then added and the combination is cooked until brown and reduced to a puree. Hot stock, salt, pepper, vinegar, and mustard are added. She writes: “French mustard is the proper one to use, but when I am short of it I substitute English, and since I have lived in England I have discovered that a pinch (no more) of curry-powder is an excellent adjunct, and pleases those who are fond of ‘une cuisine épicée’ (hot things), which I am not.” She adds one additional historical observation: “Good as it is, this Sauce Robert, so appreciated by the author of ‘Gargantua,’ does not entirely owe its celebrity to its culinary excellence, but also to a satire written by Thiers, a clever theologian of the seventeenth century, against Robert, the ‘Grand Vicaire’ of the Bishop of Chartres, which, in an allusion to the celebrated sauce mentioned by Rabelais, he called, ‘La Sauce Robert.’ The satire was denounced, and Thiers, in order to escape imprisonment, was obliged to run away.”18

In the 1860s, two French cookbooks were published that contain separate but not too dissimilar recipes for sauce Robert. The later one by Gouffé has the following recipe:

Mettez dans une casserole 3 oignons coupés en morceaux carrés et dont vous aurez retiré les parties dures ; Ajoutez 30 grammes de beurre et faites revenir rouge ; Mouillez avec 3 décilitres de vin blanc de Bourgogne et faites tomber sur glace ; Mouillez avec 1 litre d’espagnole, faites mijoter 20 minutes sur le coin du fourneau, écumez et mettez au bain-marie. Au moment de finir, faites bouillir la sauce et ajoutez 30 grammes de glace de viande et une cuillerée à bouche de moutarde ; Mêlez et servez.19

Brown 3 chopped onions in a saucepan using 30 grams of butter. Add 3 dl of white Burgundy wine. Reduce the wine to a glaze. Add 1 liter of espagnole sauce and simmer for 20 minutes on the edge of the stove.20 Skim. Keep warm in a bain-marie. Before serving, bring the sauce to a boil. Add 30 grams of meat glace and a tablespoon of mustard. Mix and serve.

Three years earlier, Dubois and Bernard had published the following recipe for sauce Robert:

Coupez en dés 2 or 3 oignons, faites-les revenir au beurre avec une pointe de sucre ; quand ils sont de belle couleur, égouttez le beurre ; mouillez-les avec un peu de bon bouillon que vous faites tomber à glace tout doucement, afin que les oignons aient le temps de cuire ; passez dans une casserole 6 décil. de sauce espagnole réduite au blond de veau et vin blanc ; vannez-la sur [le] feu en lui incorporant une pointe de cayenne, 2 cuillerées de moutarde anglaise délayée avec un peu de jus froid et enfin les oignons tombés à glace.21

Cut up 2 or 3 onions and brown in butter with a pinch of sugar. When they are well colored, drain off the butter. Moisten the onions with a little good-quality stock. Gently reduce to a glaze. Set aside. Place 6 dl of espagnole sauce in a saucepan with some light veal stock and white wine. Reduce. Over the heat, mix in a pinch of cayenne, 2 tablespoons English mustard dissolved in a little cold stock, and the reserved onion glaze.

The most significant difference between these two recipes and the one from 1996 is that neither of the earlier versions uses vinegar in the sauce. The same is true of a recipe published by Antoine Gogué around the same time.22 Other than that, and the fact that they were published about 135 years earlier, they are relatively similar. And they are similar to a recipe published a couple of decades earlier by the great Marie-Antonin Carême. Note that the main difference in the following recipe by Carême and the later ones is the addition of vinegar at the end of the preparation.

Après avoir coupé en petits dés trois gros oignons, vous les colorez blonds dans du beurre clarifié, puis vous les égouttez, et les travaillez avec du consommé et deux grandes cuillerées d’espagnole travaillée. La sauce étant réduite à point, vous y mêlez un peu de sucre en poudre, un peu de poivre, un peu de vinaigre et une cuillerée à bouche de moutarde fine.23

Finely dice 3 large onions and cook them in clarified butter until lightly colored. Drain. Mix in some consommé and 2 large spoonfuls of espagnole sauce. When the sauce is properly reduced, add a little granulated sugar, a little pepper, some vinegar, and a tablespoon of Dijon-style mustard.

Carême also gives a Lenten version where the consommé is replaced by fish stock and the espagnole sauce by a Lenten equivalent. He also provides a recipe for a roast pork loin served with sauce Robert.

If we then move back in time another 150 years, to the last half of the 17th century, and check de Lune,24 la Varenne,25 and Massialot,26 we find two additional sauce Robert recipes. Although both de Lune and Massialot have recipes, both combine the sauce recipe with a recipe for the preparation of pig’s ears. Additionally, de Lune refers to the sauce as sauce barbe Robert, a name from an earlier time. In both cases, the sauce is prepared using the same butter that was used for cooking the pig’s ears. De Lune prepares the sauce from spring onions, salt, pepper, nutmeg, vinegar, capers, and a little stock. Just before serving, mustard is incorporated.27 Massialot’s recipe is essentially identical except he writes that the ears can be seasoned with white pepper and lemon juice during cooking.28 The fourth edition of Massialot’s book, published 57 years after the first (and possibly after his death by someone else), is missing this recipe but does contain a separate recipe for sauce Robert. This additional recipe is similar to the 19th-century recipes in that vinegar is not used in its preparation.29

There are other examples from the same period. Sauce barbe Robert also exists as a separate sauce recipe in Le grand cuisine.

Prenés oygnons menus fris en sain de lard, ou beurre selon le iour, verjus, vinaigre et moustarde menu espice et sel, & faictes bouillir tout ensemble.30

To onions fried in lard or butter, add verjuice, vinegar, mustard, fine spices, and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Not only does this recipe include vinegar, but it adds verjuice, which is also tart. In later recipes, the verjuice is replaced by white wine. Also, since there is no other water or stock added to dilute the sauce, I assume that a large quantity of fat was used in this sauce to combat the tartness and acidity of the other ingredients.

An almost exact duplicate of the previous recipe can be found in Fleur de toute cuisine, another cookbook of the period.31 This may be because they both owe a significant portion of their content to a book written much earlier, the Viandier of Taillevent. One of the first French cookbooks written, upwards to 75 different versions were printed in the century and a half following its creation (late 14th-early 15th century). The original, which is not believed to exist any more, was a manuscript scribed before the invention of printing.

In the Viandier, we come to possibly the first mention of sauce Robert in a cookbook. One of the four existing manuscripts lists the name of the recipe as “La barbe Robert, autrement appelee la Taillemaslee.” Unfortunately, although the title and an alias are there, there is no recipe in the manuscript.32

Another manuscript of about the same era that may have evolved from the Viandier of Taillevent is the Vivendier. It contains a recipe for barbe Robert, but this is in reality a recipe for preparing a chicken dish with a mustard, wine, and verjuice sauce. It contains no onions and is not a separate sauce recipe.33

Whether we conclude that sauce Robert is indeed about 600 years old, or merely about 450, it has been around the culinary world in one form or another for a long time. And in the last four centuries, the recipe has evolved very little. Maybe the sauce is not popular nowadays because it has been around too long. Whatever the reason, I hope sauce Robert will soon be “discovered” and once again have a prominent place on dinner tables and in cookbooks.

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The author gratefully thanks Ken Broadhurst of Mareuil-sur-Cher, France, for his superb editing assistance with this article.

1. Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck. Mastering the Art of French Cooking. 2 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1973.

2. Noël Riley Fitch, Appetite for Life: the Biography of Julia Child. (New York: Doubleday division, Random House Books, Inc., 1999), p. 221.

3. Patrice Maubourguet, ed. Larousse Gastronomique. Paris: Larousse-Bordas, 1996. In French.

4. Sauces, online at à la carte, cited 3 August 2004.

5. Blanc-Manger: A Journey Through Time, online at à la carte, cited 3 August 2004.

6. Robert J. Courtine(?), ed. Larousse Gastronomique. Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1984. In French.

7. Taillevent. The Viander of Taillevent. Translated by Terence Scully. Edited by Terence Scully. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988.

8. Prosper Montagné. Larousse Gastronomique. Translated by Nina Froud, et al. Edited by Charlotte Turgeon and Nina Froud. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1961. English translation of 1936 French edition published by Librarie Larousse, Paris.

9. Emile Littré. Dictionnaire de la langue française. Paris: Gallimard-Hachette, 1961. In French. v. 6, p. 1647.

10. Paul-Maximilien-Emile Littré, online at Catholic Encyclopedia, cited 4 August 2004.

11. Maubourguet, ed. Larousse Gastronomique. 1996. p. 952.

12. Espagnole sauce is a traditional French base sauce, sometimes referred to as sauce brune, brown sauce. It is traditionally prepared with a rich meat stock, a mirepoix of browned vegetables, a brown roux, herbs, and sometimes tomato paste.

13. Montagné. Larousse Gastronomique. p. 849-50.

14. Ali-Bab. Gastronomie pratique: études culinaires. 5th ed. Paris: Flammarion, 1928. In French. Reprint, 1993. p. 510.

15. Ibid. p. 608-9.

16. Ibid. p. 609.

17. Auguste Escoffier. The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. Translated by H. L. Cracknell and R. J. Kaufmann. New York: Mayflower Books, Inc., 1982. Originally published as Le guide culinaire. Translation of 4th edition of Le guide culinaire (1921). p. 15.

18. Emilie Lebour-Fawssett. French Cookery for Ladies. London: J.S. Virtue & Co., Ltd., 1890. p. 425.

19. Jules Gouffé. Le livre de cuisine. 1st ed. Paris: L. Hachette et Cie, 1867. In French. Reprint, 2003 by Elibron Classics, divided into 2 volumes. p. 419.

20. This recipe comes from a period where the temperature under a saucepan was a function of physical position on the stove rather than a position of a control knob.

21. Urbain Dubois and Émile Bernard. La cuisine classique: études pratiques, raisonnées et démonstratives de l'école française appliquée au service à la russe. 1st ed. Paris: Dubois & Bernard (self-published?), 1864. In French. Reprint, 2003 by Elibron Classics, divided into 2 volumes. p. 71.

22. Antoine Gogué. Les secrets de la cuisine française. 1st ed. Paris: Librarie Hachette et Cie, 1856. In French. Reprint, 2003 by Elibron Classics. p. 111.

23. Marie Antonin Carême. L'art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle. Original edition published between 1833 and 1844. ed. 3 vols. Vol. 3. Paris: Au Dépot de Librairie, 1854. In French. Reprint, 2003 by Elibron Classics, divided into 4 volumes. v. 3, p. 103-4.

24. Pierre de Lune. Le cuisinier, 1656. Reprinted in L'art de la cuisine fançaise au xvii^e sièle, Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 1995. In French.

25. François Pierre de la Varenne, Le cuisinier françois, ou est enseigné la maniere d’apprêter toute sorte de viandes, de faire toute sorte de patisseries, & de confitures. (Photocopy of 1680 edition [Lyon: Jacques Canier]) [ebook] (Universitat de Barcelona, 31 Dec 2001 [cited 27 Dec 2003]).

26. François Massialot. Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois, qui apprend à ordonner toute forts de Repas, & la meilleure maniere des Ragoûts les plus à la mode & le plus exquis. 1st ed. Paris: Charles de Sercy, 1691. In French. Reprint, no information.

27. de Lune. Le cuisinier. p. 279.

28. Massialot. Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois, qui apprend à ordonner toute forts de Repas, & la meilleure maniere des Ragoûts les plus à la mode & le plus exquis. p. 340.

29. François Massialot. Le nouveau cuisinier royal et bourgeois ou cuisine moderne. 4th ed. 3 vols. Paris: Joseph Saugrain, 1748 (vol. I & II) 1750 (vol. III). Originally published as Le cuisiner roïal et bourgeois (Paris: Charles de Sercy) in 1691. In French. Reprint, 2003 by Eibron Classics, divided into 5 volumes. v. 2. p. 322.

30. Jérôme Pichon and Georges Vicaire. Le viander de Guillaume Tirel dit Taillevent. Paris: Techener, 1892. Reprint, 1991 by Régis Lehoucq Éditeur.

31. Taillevent. The Viander of Taillevent. p. 226.

32. Ibid. p. 226.

33. Terence Scully, ed. The Vivendier. Totnes, England: Prospect Books, 1997. p. 31.