Sauce (n.): The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted, a vice is renounced and forgiven.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)
Imagine, if you will, a plateful of perfectly steamed asparagus without a spot of hollandaise, or an expertly cooked steak lacking a side of béarnaise, or a delicate fillet of fish missing its beurre blanc companion. Then again, why imagine such things at all? The French certainly don’t, as they are known worldwide for their love of sauces and their great skill in inventing them. The typical French refrigerator features tidy rows of jarred sauces, little gastronomic soldiers ready to be called into action.
Many French sauces have historical legends and heated disputes attached to them. For example, one of the most useful French sauces, béchamel, was created in the seventeenth century, most likely adapted by François-Pierre de La Varenne, one of the most famous chefs of that (or any) era, from an Italian sauce. Years later, the Marquis de Béchameil (or perhaps his cook) tweaked the sauce a bit more and served it to Louis XIV, and managed to attach his name to the sauce in perpetuity. This created a fair bit of controversy at the time, as those who had been using similar versions of the sauce for years felt slighted. The unhappy Duke d’Escars protested, “He is a lucky one, this little Bechamel—I was serving chicken breast with cream twenty years before he was even born.”1
But one aspect common to nearly all modern French sauces is their emergence after the mid-sixteenth century and the end of the medieval era. While sauces had been part of European cuisine for centuries, many were hardly recognizable as the sauces we know today. The ancient Romans loved a sauce called garum, for example, which was basically fermented fish guts. It was very salty and expensive, and one of the few sauces that the Romans used (the habit of lying down for eating made it messy and impractical to be overly saucy).
Sauces were much more popular in medieval France, but still fairly alien to our modern tastes. They were heavily spiced; the popular poivrade, for example, was made with black pepper, garlic, and vinegar, while cameline sauces included cloves, nutmeg, and ginger. The vibrant yellow poivre jaunet sauce was made with saffron and ginger. Exotic spices such as galangal, a gingerlike root from Asia, and peppery “grains of paradise” from West Africa would have been well known to a French chef of the fourteenth century. It is frequently alleged that this overuse of spice was intended to cover up the taste of meat and fish in this pre-refrigeration era, but this theory does not hold up to scrutiny: the kinds of people who could afford these expensive spices could also afford to buy fresh provisions for their table.2 It is more likely that the heavy use of spices was due to the superior social status and wealth they conveyed, or a genuine belief that they were simply more appealing than domestic European herbs. Medieval palates had far more tolerance for heavily spiced meals, which were believed to be easier to digest, and people were fond of the brightly colored dishes that spices produced.
Medieval sauces were also very acidic, as they relied heavily on vinegar, lemons, and especially verjus, or verjuice, made from unripe grapes. Verjuice was probably used in more than half of the sauces at that time, though it was eventually superseded by lemon juice in those sauces requiring a bit of acidity. It did not entirely disappear from French cuisine—the distinctive ingredient in the original recipe for Dijon mustard, for example, was verjuice—but nowadays you would struggle to find verjuice in a typical French supermarket. Like many traditional ingredients, however, it is making something of a comeback of late, as cooks rediscover its usefulness as a slightly less tart substitute for wine and vinegar in sauces, marinades, and salad dressings. In several Middle Eastern cuisines, variants of verjuice have never gone out of fashion, as the enduring appeal of husrum in Lebanon, or ab-ghooreh in Iran, demonstrates.
Medieval sauces generally did not include fat, whether oil or butter. The most popular cookbooks of the fourteenth century, such as Le Viandier de Taillevent and Le Ménagier de Paris, use no butter or oil in any of their sauces. But by the seventeenth century, cookbooks such as L’art de bien traiter and La Cuisinière bourgeoise used butter in more than half their sauces and oil in another 20 percent.3 This culinary revolution is partly explained by the Protestant challenge to Catholic proscriptions on butter, as well as to a growing inclination within French society toward more natural approaches in the arts and culture generally (butter and oil were thought to be more respectful of the natural taste of food than vinegar and spices). Modern French sauces tend to use an outrageous amount of butter or cream, so much so that one of the first sacrifices a French dieter usually makes is to eliminate sauces from the dining table. A steep price to pay, indeed.
As fats were increasingly added to most sauces, the use of vinegar and verjuice was reduced, and sauces became less acidic. Another important change was the “discovery” of locally produced herbs and vegetables, such as chives, garlic, shallots, and mushrooms, which began to be used in sauces as well. As we have seen, these common garden crops were long enjoyed by the French masses before eventually becoming accepted and popularized by the noble and wealthy classes.
Very gradually, therefore, the spicy-acidic flavors of the medieval era were supplanted by the cream, butter, and herb triumvirate associated with modern French cuisine—not only in sauces but in cooking more generally. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French chefs gradually abandoned the strong, overwhelming flavors of medieval cooking for a more natural and delicate approach. Local herbs replaced exotic spices, sauces and dressings were designed to enhance rather than overwhelm their underlying dishes, and vegetables were served fresh and crisp rather than boiled beyond recognition. For centuries, it had been culinary tradition to meld many ingredients into complex, artificial fusions; now the preference was for simpler dishes with complementary seasonings, in which the unique flavor of each ingredient could be captured and discerned.
The radical idea that “food should taste like what it is,” advocated by prominent early culinary authors like Nicolas de Bonnefons, was partly inspired by broader societal changes associated with modernity.4 Some argue, for example, that the shift away from heavily spiced foods was due to the scientific revolution and the rise of modern medical practices, which discredited the Galenic approach to diet and its emphasis on balancing “humors.” Now food could be enjoyed for its taste, not its supposedly medicinal effects. Others argue that spices became less of a luxury product in the latter half of the seventeenth century, following a massive expansion in international trade that made spices less expensive while also introducing unusual foods from newly colonized lands. Once ordinary people were able to cook with formerly noble ingredients, their appeal to the elites faded. The invention of the raised kitchen stove in the early seventeenth century enabled the cooking of sauces and other dishes that required constant stirring and impeccable timing, a difficult endeavor when cooking was done over hearth fires. Later, the spread of Enlightenment thinking in the eighteenth century led people to search for a more “authentic” lifestyle, in harmony with nature. All of these social changes encouraged the development of a simpler, more natural cuisine, and this shift was particularly evident in French sauce making.5
Another important event in the evolution of French sauces occurred in the early nineteenth century, thanks to a legendary French chef named Marie-Antonin Carême. Carême was born in 1783, one of fifteen children. At the age of ten, he was abandoned by his father, who told the young lad that he would be better off on his own (as it turned out, this was probably true). Carême found work in a tavern and learned the basics of cooking. At thirteen, he became an apprentice to Monsieur Sylvain Bailly, one of the most renowned patissiers in Paris, who encouraged Carême to study architectural drawings and construct breathtaking pastry creations. Carême’s mastery of this art of pièce montée brought him considerable renown, and he was eventually discovered by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the famous diplomat of the Napoleonic era. Talleyrand was keen to use gastronomy as a diplomatic weapon, and Carême became his general, working in his kitchens for twelve years. While cooking for the greatest men in Europe, Carême also began to refine and organize French cuisine, and is thus seen as one of the most pivotal figures in French gastronomy.
Carême sought to bring order to the French sauce universe and decided that there were four basic “mother sauces” from which all other sauces could be derived: allemande, béchamel, espagnole, and velouté. These sauces might be a bit boring on their own, but the idea is that by adding a few ingredients, you can make some far more exciting “daughter sauces.” Add Gruyère and egg yolks to béchamel sauce and you have Mornay sauce; add crayfish, brandy, and cream instead and you have Nantua sauce. Bordelaise sauce is nothing more than espagnole sauce with shallots, red wine, and herbs, while Breton sauce is made from adding mushrooms, leeks, and white wine to a velouté. So these four mother sauces can produce an almost endless variety of descendants, each intended to complement the specific dish they accompany (in contrast to earlier eras, where one sauce might be used rather indiscriminately with all sorts of differently flavored dishes). Talleyrand may have been inspired by Carême when he reportedly said, “England has three sauces and three hundred religions, whereas France has three religions and three hundred sauces.”6
If you cook a bit, you may notice that all these sauces use a roux, a butter-and-flour mix that thickens the sauce, and so you may be wondering how to derive a flourless hollandaise or béarnaise from them. These sauces actually arrived later in French history, thanks to another famous chef whom we have already met, Auguste Escoffier. In the twentieth century, he decided to update the sauce categories and stated that there were five mother sauces. He added hollandaise and tomato sauce to the existing list and demoted allemande sauce (German sauce) to a derivative of espagnole sauce. Escoffier may not have been overly enamored of Germany, as he was a prisoner of war there in 1870. He did cook, however, for Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is reported to have been so delighted with his meal that he told him: “I am the Emperor of Germany, but you are the Emperor of Chefs.”7
Finally, despite the tyranny of butter in French sauce making, we might remember that the French are also world famous for a sauce that uses no butter at all—mayonnaise, which relies on oil instead. There are many legends about the creation of mayonnaise, but the most often cited claims that it was invented after the French capture of the Spanish port of Mahón, on Minorca, in 1756. The Duke of Richelieu, who was in charge of the French troops, had a feast to celebrate the victory. His cook wanted to make a sauce of eggs and cream, but as he couldn’t find cream locally, he used olive oil instead. Et voilà, mayonnaise was created!
Sauces are more than just a dollop of flavor on a favorite dish—a whole universe of gastronomic sensibilities resides within those small jars and spoonfuls. From garum to vegan mayo, they offer a delicious glimpse into the cultural zeitgeist. So it is perhaps not surprising that they transformed so radically during the discoveries and tumult of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to which we shall now return.