Brown Sauce and Human Flesh

Tonight we made brown sauces. The high point was making a Bordelaise sauce with poached bone marrow. I’d never seen bone marrow before, much less chopped it up and added it to a sauce. Very interesting, but psychologically I couldn’t get past the mental thought of eating goop sucked out of cow bones.

The um-okay moment came when Chef Instructor, while making Sauce Robert , told a little anecdote about the sauce. Apparently, when pouring Sauce Robert over meat it takes on the flavor of human flesh. Now who the hell would actually know this?

My “um-okay” turned into a curious desire to find out more. After a few Google searches, it turns out there is something behind all of this. Apparently the Sleeping Beauty fairytale (the part not show in the G-rate movie version) indicates that her mother-in-law despised her and hired a hit man to kill her so she could feast on her flesh. The hit man falls in love with Sleeping Beauty and decides he can’t kill her. Instead, he kills a lamb, covers it in Sauce Robert, and viola, mother-in-law thinks she’s chowing down on Sleeping Beauty.

Maybe if Dahmer knew how to make Sauce Robert, a few lives could have been saved.