22.1 What a sauce is, and where sauces came from

What a sauce does

Nobody eats a sauce on its own. It is there for the food it is served with. At one end, a sauce works like a condiment and gives a contrast: mustard cuts the richness of pork or stands up to grilled food. At the other end, a sauce carries the food's own flavor further, the way the drippings of a roast or the liquid of a stew do. Most sauces sit between the two, laying a contrasting taste over the food's natural flavor.

Choosing sauces for a whole meal takes thought too:

• One is often enough. Two is usually the limit for a single meal. If you serve two, make their flavors, colors and textures differ while their style matches.
• Do not crowd the plate. New cooks tend to put too many colors and flavors together. One sauce blended carefully into a whole that seems simple beats a plate covered in different garnishes.
• Move through the meal in order. Courses, and their sauces, usually run from pale to deep in color and from cold dishes to hot ones, so the palate and the eye do not tire. Keep strong sauces away from the start of a meal unless something at least as bold follows.
• Match the occasion and the season. An aioli or a Mexican salsa suits a casual summer lunch. A sauce poivrade is classic and formal, and belongs in autumn or winter.

Classic French sauces are taught first not because they taste better than regional sauces or those of other countries. They are taught first because they form a tidy, strict system that is easy to remember and to build on, and its ideas carry over to other cuisines. Once you know how the ingredients behave, you can invent your own sauces and read unfamiliar recipes with confidence.

Greece and Rome

Little survives of ancient Greek cookery. Most of what is known comes from Archestrate, who wrote more about where to buy food, fish above all, than about how to cook it. The methods he names are plain, mostly frying and roasting. Greek sauces often used cheese and oil, sometimes with cumin.

Roman cooking is known mainly through Marcus Gavius Apicius, in the first century A.D. Roman cooks poured garum, a liquid made from fish entrails, into almost everything, alone as a sauce or mixed with leeks, onions, spices, wine, honey and olive oil. Its nearest modern relatives are probably the fermented fish sauces of Southeast Asia, such as nampla in Thailand and nuoc mam in Vietnam. Most Roman sauces also used honey and many herbs and spices, among them cumin, coriander leaves, dill, rue and caraway. Wine boiled down to an inky color (defritum) colored some sauces. Many recipes simply say to "bind" the sauce; some name starch, others whole eggs.

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Crusaders who came home from the Middle East brought sugar cane, almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, citrus fruits and spinach to Europe, and spices became more common. The usual sauce liquids were verjuice (the sour juice of unripe grapes, sometimes of crab apples) and vinegar, often set against honey, dried fruit or rare sugar. Nearly every recipe used several spices at once, such as saffron, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and cardamom.

There were no stocks in the modern sense yet. Cooks turned beef bouillon or cooking liquids into sauces by binding them with bread, almonds, egg yolks, puréed liver or the puréed food itself. Bread and almonds were pounded together first and wetted with verjuice, vinegar, wine or milk; beaten yolks went in at the end, as they still do.

The way people ate shaped those sauces. Food sat on thick slices of bread called trenchers, not plates, and was eaten with the fingers. A thin sauce would have soaked into the bread, so sauces were probably thick enough to cling to the food. Only when plates came into wider use could sauces become thinner and more delicate.

In the sixteenth century sugar became easier to get, though still not cheap, and recipes used more of it. Together with a keen interest in gardening, this led to jams and jellies much like those made today.

The seventeenth century: food that tastes of itself

French cooking now began to stand apart from the rest of Europe, with an idea that still guides sauce making: food should taste of itself. Spices that hid a food's own flavor were slowly dropped in favor of a lighter hand, especially with pepper. Herbs such as tarragon, chervil, basil and thyme came into common use, as did shallots, carrots, celery, wild mushrooms, truffles, anchovies, capers and cornichons (small sour gherkins). Butter took over from lard for cooking the flavor base and became part of sauces themselves. Oil, butter or coulis softened the sharpness of vinegar.

The great new tool was roux, then called farine frite. Before it, toasted bread was the usual thickener. Bread had the edge in tasting less of flour, but roux made a smoother sauce and stayed the favorite thickener well into the twentieth century. At first, flour went straight into meat juices that had been cooked down until they caught on the pot and browned, and was cooked there until it smelled toasty or turned reddish. That color is probably where the word roux comes from. Stews and gravies are still thickened this way, but for classic sauces the roux is now made on its own and measured into the stock.

Brown sauces of the time were built on coulis, a concentrated essence of veal or beef. Cooks also made very strong liquid bases from huge amounts of meat: a jus was pressed out of browned meat. Puréed almonds, mushrooms and truffles all served as thickeners alongside roux.

The eighteenth century: a system

Coulis, jus and bouillons were put into a system, so a trained cook could move between kitchens and turn out the same results. The old sour sauces faded, and new ones mixed the two older styles: coulis went into sharp sauces such as sauce Robert, and oil or butter softened acidic bases into vinaigrette and beurre blanc. Egg yolks were handled with more care, and the first forms of hollandaise appeared. Roux, now made with butter instead of lard, became the thickener of choice, and early forms of velouté appeared. Espagnole, béchamel and italienne all date from this century. Menon's La Cuisinière Bourgeoise, written for middle-class households, was the first of its kind.

The nineteenth century: mother sauces

After the French Revolution, cooks who had worked for the nobility found themselves without work, and fine cooking moved into restaurants that anyone with money could visit. Restaurants and the rise of chefs are covered with the history of the trade. see chapter 1: The first true restaurants

Antonin Carême wrote more about food than anyone else of his century. More importantly, he set out the system of mother sauces (sauces mères) and the many smaller sauces made from them. He named four: espagnole, velouté, allemande and béchamel. He also had the mother sauces reduced ahead, so that only a few flavors had to be added at the last minute to finish a small sauce. Carême also recorded the first modern mayonnaise, which he spelled magnonaise: olive oil and aspic bound with uncooked yolks.

At the end of the century, Auguste Escoffier gathered this cooking into Le Guide Culinaire, which many cooks still treat as the final word on classical French cooking. He simplified it further. His four mother sauces were espagnole, velouté, béchamel and tomato, with hollandaise and mayonnaise just behind.

The twentieth century: less flour

Edouard Nignon, a restaurant owner early in the century, made brown sauces with no flour at all, using strong veal stock and veal glace in place of espagnole. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, the cooks of nouvelle cuisine removed flour from many sauces and thickened them instead with cream, butter and egg yolks, serving smaller amounts with a lighter texture. Not everyone agreed. Some chefs relied so heavily on cream and butter that the "lighter" sauces were in fact richer than the flour sauces they replaced. A country stew such as coq au vin is still best served in its own liquid, lightly thickened with flour.

In the 1970s Michel Guérard went further. He made sauces with almost no cream, butter or egg yolk, surrounded dishes with aromatic broths, thickened with yogurt and fresh cheese, and used a light sabayon for savory sauces. Since then, French and American chefs have borrowed widely from regional and ethnic cooking, including Indian food, and have begun using spices in sauces again.

Dessert sauces

Sweet dishes have sauces too, and they help a dessert in flavor and in looks just as savory sauces help meat and vegetables. The most useful are:

• Caramel sauce. The darker the sugar cooks, the more bitter it tastes, so stop it at the strength you want and add liquid. The liquid halts the cooking, adds flavor and softens the sauce. Cream, milk or butter make it rich; water keeps it clear; fruit purée changes the flavor. How runny it ends up depends on how much liquid you add and how warm you serve it.
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• Chocolate sauce, also called fudge sauce: cream or milk, butter and chocolate, served hot or cold. The balance of the three sets its thickness.
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• Crème anglaise ("English custard"): eggs, sugar and milk or cream, stirred on the heat until it turns into a thin, pourable custard. Keep it at or below 85°C (185°F) while it cooks, or it scrambles.
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• Coulis (in French, "strained liquid"): usually a raw, strained purée with pure flavor and bright color. It can separate quickly on the plate, so use it at the last minute. A fruit sauce is puréed fruit that is cooked with a starch to thicken it, and it is usually served cold.
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• Compote (French for "mixture"): fruit, fresh, frozen or dried, cooked and served in its own liquid, usually a sugar syrup.
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• Curd: fruit juice, eggs, butter and sugar cooked much like crème anglaise, from pourable to spreadable. Fruit butter holds no butter at all; it is whole fruit cooked, reduced and often puréed until very thick.
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• Hard sauce: butter, sugar and flavorings, often liqueur, piped, chilled and set on a warm steamed pudding just before serving.
• Sabayon: yolks, sugar and flavoring whisked over simmering water until thick, then whisked until cool. Whipped cream may be plain, sweetened or flavored; crème chantilly adds sugar and vanilla.
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A dessert sauce usually goes on the plate rather than over the dessert, so the dessert keeps its looks. Flooding covers the plate with a pool of sauce; a second sauce of the same thickness can be drawn through it with a pick or knife tip to make a feathered pattern. Outlining pipes a chocolate design that sets, then fills the spaces with colored sauce. A squeeze bottle, a spoon, a brush or an offset spatula makes dots, lines and streaks.

Choose the sauce for balance. A sharp berry sauce lifts a rich cheesecake or chocolate dessert, because acid cuts through fat. A sweet sauce on a sweet dessert hides the flavor of both. Flavor comes first and presentation second.