Sauce Robert 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

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 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]