Sauce, Part 1: What Is a Sauce?
Some time ago I held a small course on the art of making sauces for a group of friends. We went through a number of basic sauces and variations while cooking a dinner where we could use everything we made. I promised at the time that I would put together a short guide to sauces, so here it is.
What is a sauce?
A little history and explanation are probably in order, and we may even get into some chemistry along the way.
In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee describes sauces as liquids served with the main ingredient of a dish. Their job is to deepen its flavour or provide contrast, making the whole dish richer and more satisfying. In short, a sauce gives the cook an enormous amount of freedom.
As you can probably tell, a sauce can be many things. Carême, one of the first great chefs, classified most sauces in the early nineteenth century as descendants of a handful of so-called mother sauces. Auguste Escoffier retained this way of thinking and listed around two hundred variations in Le Guide Culinaire.
Nouvelle cuisine emerged in the late 1960s as a reaction against the traditional methods associated with Escoffier and Carême. Heavy sauces such as béchamel, espagnole and hollandaise gave way to lighter ways of flavouring food with fresh herbs, butter, lemon juice and vinegar.
I will leave England aside for now. Its sauce traditions developed somewhat separately from the rest of Europe, prompting the old French joke that England had many religions but only one sauce: melted butter.
There is plenty I would like to cover, so this post is the introduction to a short series. I will go through the traditional mother sauces and some of their variations, including béarnaise and Périgueux. I will also look at lighter, more modern approaches, such as using stock, vinegar and herbs as sauces.
Later posts will include recipes and practical methods, along with stock-making and a list of useful books and sources. As the series grows, I will collect the links here so everything is easy to find.
More to come.
Tore