This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
“I like your sauce!” is an unlikely compliment nowadays, except perhaps in an old-fashioned drag act. Hundreds of sauces used to crowd the Répertoire de la cuisine and compete for column-space in Larousse gastronomique.
Nowadays, they need a conservation society to save them from extinction. Home cooks eschew them or buy them in bottles. Even in restaurants, the range available is dwindling and predictable.
By “sauce” I mean a liquid or viscous garnish, prepared apart from the dish it dresses. The juice food may exude in cooking is a proper accompaniment at the table. So is a drizzle or dollop of the liquid in which cooking happens — fat from the frying-pan or the liquor of braised or stewed concoctions.
But they are not sauces, which take extra time and trouble. That, I suppose, is why they have become an endangered species — victims of the deprofessionalisation of cooking. Home cooks have not lost the taste for them but the will to work at them.
We are at a crisis in the history of sauces: to save them, as with every form of civility and good manners that are vanishing from the world, we have to reignite doused or dampened traditions.
The hierophants of grande cuisine are responsible, in part, for the problem. To enhance their own mystique, Escoffier and his ilk represented the art as exigent and esoteric. They listed litanies of sauces. Sauce bâtarde, sauce Chateaubriand, sauce Colbert, sauce Sainte-Menehoulde, priez pour nous.
They baffled eaters with hundreds of names, most of which denoted more or less the same few variants. They proposed confusing categorisations according to flavour or colour. They over-complicated the taxonomy.
They wrote recipes untranslatable into ordinary kitchens, like the geek-speak in instruction manuals that drives tech users to call in an expensive expert.
Those who want to contribute to the renaissance of the sauce can take encouragement. No gnosis is required. If one looks at them from the cook’s viewpoint there are only five kinds of sauce, to be combined or modified creatively in any way that pleases.
The first starts with a roux — a paste of flour in warm liquid, thinned and flavoured as one likes. Béchamel is the commonest form, in which melted butter is the starting liquid and milk brings the roux to the desired consistency before herbs, spices, cheese or anything else that takes the fancy goes into the mix.
The second is a reduction, which transforms the unaesthetic residue that clings to a roasting dish or frying pan by boiling in water, stock, wine or spiritous liquor, or any combination of the three, until a gravy or syrup of suitable richness is left, to be enhanced with any extra tingle, tanginess, creaminess or crunch.
Emulsion sauces include the likes of Hollandaise, heurre blanc, beurre monté and Béarnaise
Third is an emulsion, which usually starts with a viscous base — typically egg-yolk or a roux — into which oil (I’d never use any except olive oil or clarified butter) or, for some purposes, wine, stock or another flavoursome liquid, is gently stirred drop by drop.
Alternatively, a base of well crushed solids can be the starting-point — nuts, pummelled to dust; or garlic or other vegetables, pounded into pulp. Mustard is an emulsion of powder with a liquid in which water, wine or vinegar predominates.
When the consistency is what the cook wants, transmutative extra ingredients can adjust colour and savour. Mayonnaise is the classic cold emulsion and will withstand the addition of almost anything chopped or sprinkled. But a warm emulsion can be equally successful, made in the steam from a boiling pot of water or, for ease and safety, in a bain-marie.
Sauces of the fourth kind are purées, which are easy for cooks who have electric whizzers and rewarding for those, like me, who rely on a fork and a sieve. The chances of an experiment misfiring are minimal as long as one keeps a steady hand when adjusting seasoning and sweetness.
The curdling that may mar an emulsion is impossible. A cack-handed cook can burn a roux, but not a purée. Imbalanced ingredients can make a reduction irredeemable, but you can keep modifying a purée until you get it perfect.
Finally, anyone can make the basis of a cold sauce by blending edible and compatible liquids. Salad dressings, relishes, ketchups and some pickling media are of this kind.
As with all sauces, in combining contents and matching them to the dishes with which they will be served, only three ingredients are mandatory: fancy, ambition and common sense.
