When I was in culinary school I had to write a paper on sauces. I will now wahmish you with it…
From antiquity to the present day man has tried to increase the taste, appearance, and mouth feel of meats and vegetables with the addition of sauces. Over the centuries, the appearance and composition of these sauces has changed dramatically, but their purposes have not.
References in print to sauce usage date back as far as the early 16th Century, but sauces were utilized much earlier, dating at least to the late roman period. The objectives of the sauces used in this period were different than our approaches to sauces are today. These Roman period sauces were used primarily to cover or conceal the questionable freshness of meats. They were highly flavorful, often indistinguishable, concoctions of dozens of ingredients. The cooks of the day would add as many spices as possible to a sauce to confuse the pallet and demonstrate the wealth of the host. Attention to complimentary flavors was not important.
Fish stock sauces were among the most popular due in part to the extensive Roman fishing industry and in part to the overwhelming qualities of fish. One of the most popular sauces was a highly pungent sauce made from sardines known as liquamen. It was so widely popular that it was mass produced and marketed throughout Rome. (Stradley).[1]
Sauces continued to be reformed and perfected over the coming centuries. In the common court, they continued their role of covering and concealing . In the aristocratic court where only the finest and freshest meats and produce were prepared and served, chefs were allowed to work and adjust their sauces to be complimentary to, rather than overpowering of, their primary dishes.
By the height of French Aristocracy, a good chef in the court of a nobleman was a prized possession. Nothing in his repertoire was more prized than his ability to make a good sauce. It showed a level of cookery above that of the common cook. The food of courtly France was produced by guilds, each guild producing a certain aspect of the meal with the Chef in charge of meal planning. Chefs often acted as saucier, or sauce chef, as the final test of taste and mouth-feel rested on his shoulders.
With the fall of the French kingdom, the guilds were abolished and Chefs were allowed to share and combine recipes into common groups. In the world of sauce production, the French Master Chef Marie-Antoine Careme, simplified recipes into a list of what he referred to as Mother Sauces. His list began with the two oldest sauces even of that day, hollandaise or mayonnaise and béchamel. These types of sauces have remained a staple for centuries because they are easily produced and make for a good, adaptable base for a number of other sauces. The three remaining sauces take longer to produce, have more ingredients, and are more complex in flavor but were still the main base sauces of the French Revolutionary Period as well as the following hundred to hundred and fifty years. These three sauces are the Brown or Espagnole, Veloute, and Tomato sauces. Each of these sauces relies heavily on the prior production of a good stock. To make one of these sauces of notable quality it took as long as several days. The first day was spent rendering a quality stock from bones and mirepoix, and the next day was spent turning this stock into a high quality, yet highly volatile sauce. These sauces did not keep well, especially in the days prior to refrigeration and deep freezers, and had to be used immediately and just prior to serving. The time and effort involved continued to make these sauces for the elite.
Within France, anyone well to do enough to go to any restaurant could, and still can, eat in a very formal and traditional style complete with small sauces created from Careme’s Mother Sauces. Even as late as the 1950s in Paris, the saucier was considered a position in a kitchen of great acclaim. Jacque Pepin wrote in his memoir, “The Apprentice; My Life in the Kitchen,” “…I found opposite my name the words ‘first commis’ If a second commis is the buck private of a kitchen brigade, a first commis is more like a lieutenant, someone who has survived a few battles, who remains calm under fire, and who has earned a measure of trust. Before my second year was out, I had attained that was considered the ultimate first commis posting: the sauce. To be considered a great saucier was the highest accolade a cook could receive. The subtlety, intricacy and lightness of sauce could make a dish.” (Pepin).[2]
Outside of France, however, fine French cuisine, and the sauces that came with it became something of luxury that most people would never experience. Over the previous centuries the rift between the fine sauce eating elite and the common man of the villages and rural areas widened. Cookbooks of the early 20th Century meant for the common household cook, rarely even mentioned the Mother Sauces. This was, of course, except for the ever popular béchamel and hollandaise sauces. Fine French restaurants in London, Berlin, New York, and Chicago still featured all of the complex sauces, at a price however.
It wasn’t until the 1960s, when all eyes were turned to the Kennedy White House, that serious French cuisine slipped into the kitchens of mainstream Americans. The Kennedy’s had as their personal chef, Chef Rene Verdon. No less scrutinized than the hats of Jackie Kennedy were the fine French meals being served in the White House. Housewives across America scrambled to snatch up recipies and techniques wherever they were to be found. One such American housewife was there to provide.
Having spent several years in Paris with her husband, Paul, a young Californian woman named Julia Child had learned the art of fine French cuisine and, with the help of a circle of other displaced American and British housewives, prepared a cookbook of simplified, yet refined, French recipes. Upon her return to the United States, she began broadcasting her secrets, the secrets of the French masters, on February 11, 1963 on Boston’s WGBH-TV. (Child).[3] The program quickly took off and was widely syndicated. She was an instant hit. Everyone was a fan of her, her personality, and her easy to follow classic recipes.
Within a decade, she had substantial help spreading the word. Every cook at home, every small restaurant, every caterer, every fine dining restaurant was serving French food, or some vague resemblance to it, again.
The 1970s and the early 1980s were a time defined in the kitchen by thick, gluey, improperly prepared sauces. The only thing classical about this onslaught was that, like the early Roman sauces, these sauces were going a long way to cover less than appetizing main courses. Cooks, and chefs alike, had forgotten the importance that Careme and Escoffier had placed on sauces being a flavoring enhancer and not the star of the show. Sauces had become too popular to be sustainable. Shortcuts were taken in the stock production that carried on through to the final small sauces.
It wasn’t long before the consumer was tired of every menu item being “dressed” with some sauce. A return to the simple, plain, healthy, even organic, was soon to sweep the nation. There was no room for sauces thickened with flour and finished with butter in this new wave of culinary preference.
This wasn’t to say that there was no longer room for sauces, but rather the way that a sauce was defined needed to be rethought. In the book “The Elements of Cooking” by Michael Ruhlman, a sauce is defined as such; “We tend to think of sauce as something we pour over something else just before serving it, but practically speaking, sauce is any seasoned fat, acid, cooking liquid, juice, plant puree, or combination thereof, that we add to a main ingredient to enhance it, and it’s helpful to the cook to think of it in this fundamental way.” (Ruhlman).[4] No longer are we held to the belief that the mother sauces and their small sauces are the Way and the Truth. Our eyes have been opened to view a whole new world of possibilities. Many of these other sauce possibilities have been around for decades, or even centuries, themselves but only recently have we given them the endorsement they deserve.
Eyes turned to the Mediterranean and to Asia for ideas.
The Italians had, for the most part, dropped the stock from their tomato sauces. This eliminated the hours of pre-production time needed. Italian pesto sauces had existed since Roman times, prior to the introduction of tomatoes from South America, and again became popular. “Pesto” is Italian for “pounded,” in reference to the herbs and spices being pounded and ground into a paste. It refers to not only the familiar basil pesto but also other pounded or ground sauces like mustards.
“Salsa” is the Spanish word for “sauce” and the chunky fresh salsas we have come to know and love from Spain and Mexico are far from the laboriously cooked and processed Mother Sauces of Careme’s day.
The Middle East gave the culinary world a wide assortment of dips and sauces from firey tomato and pepper dishes to the soft creamy tahini.
Asia contributed entire tomes of recipes for sauces. Simple fermented soy products are used for dipping or as a prepared ingredient in larger main dishes. Some Asian, or Asian-inspired, sauces, like sweet and sour sauce, take a week or more to produce, but still can not be categorized as any of the Mother Sauces categories. Spicy sauces on meat and vegetables, pastes of hot wasabi root, and acidic fish sauces are just a few of the myriad of Asian sauces.
One simple sauce that has survived throughout the ages in both the European kitchen and in the American heart is butter. A butter sauce can be just a simple piece of raw butter infused with spices and herbs put on a piece of meat, or a melted butter sauce like beurre blanc served with fish. Even during the nearly sauce-free era of the 1950s, “Butter Steak” was found in every grocer freezer. Today many steak and seafood chain restaurants still serve steak with infused butters.
Even desert has it’s list of sauces. Everything from caramel sauce, syrups, fruit purees, melted chocolate, and the ever present butter sauce top deserts globally. Perhaps no desert sauce is more prevalent than nature’s own inert sugar sauce, honey.
No matter how much you think you “don’t really like sauces,” if you look in your refrigerator and check out your menu selections when eating out you‘re certain to see a whole list of things that can be considered a sauce by our new definition. Everything from sausage gravy you made for breakfast, to the condiment packets handed to you in handfuls at the drive-thru window is a sauce. Even the 6 bottles of assorted salad dressings in the fridge can be considered sauces for salads. Sauces, whether we think we like them or not, play a huge role in our menu choices, and are here to stay with us forever.
It is safe to say in this world of culinary experimentation and awareness of worldwide cuisines, our selections of sauces will only increase. The Mother Sauces of Careme’s day are still around too, waiting in the shadows, a throwback to an all but forgotten world of cookery. In our new, more health and time conscious, economically struggling times, we turn our eyes to fresher, healthier, and more easily produced but no less satisfying sauces. Someday, who knows when, we will again reach a golden age of French Revival Cuisine, and it can be assured that Careme and his list of Mother Sauces will be there again leading the way.
[1] Stradley, Linda. “History of Sauces” What’s Cooking America 2004
[2] Pepin, Jacques. The Apprentice; My Life in the Kitchen New York. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003
[3] Child, Julia. The French Chef Cookbook New York. Alfred A Knopf, 1996
[4] Ruhlman, Michael. The Elements of Cooking; Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen New York. Scribner,