Five Mother Sauces

Sauces are an important part of classical French cuisine and date back to the Middle Ages. Sauces were invented as cooking mediums, meat tenderizers and flavor enhancers. Each culture developed its own style, using favored ingredients and techniques. There were many hundreds of sauces in the culinary repertoire. In 'classical' French cooking (19th and 20th century until nouvelle cuisine), sauces were a major defining characteristic of French cuisine. Sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavor, moisture, and visual appeal to another dish.

French cuisine, influenced by Roman cuisine, saw the first sauce recipes using meat jus in the fifth and sixth centuries, and were then called saulce. To the jus was added vinegar, wine, acidic fruits and spices. The Romans had already used ginger and cloves, but in the eleventh century, the Crusaders brought back others from the Levant, including cinnamon, the most commonly used, galangal (or ginger), coriander seeds, cumin, nutmeg, cardamom, saffron, grains of paradise and pepper. The acidic quality was often given to sauces through the addition of verjus, made from green grapes, which are not yet sweet in flavor and remain acidic, or with other acidic fruit such as apple, lemon or plums. Verjus is still used in French sauces.

Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent wrote one of the earliest recipe collections of medieval France, Le Viandier, around 1375. Most meat was boiled or cooked over a spit, i.e. quite plain, so sauces were a way to liven them up. These early sauces, spiced and pungent, sweet and sour, do not, however, qualify as ancestors of what we know today as French sauces. Rather, they - and the sauces served in France until the beginning of the modern period - were a continuation of Roman and Mediterranean practice. A typical Taillevent sauce for roasts consisted of mustard, red wine, powdered cinnamon, and sugar. Elsewhere, ginger and saffron crop up frequently. On the other hand, we do detect the beginnings of what we sould call sauce in Taillevent's coulis, broths thickened with cream, butter, and egg yolks, which served as the basis of the soups so popular at the time. Roux was unknown as a thickening agent, and the most commmon liaison was bread or toast. About thirty sauces have been recorded during the medieval period. They of course featured in the cuisine of the well-to-do.

During the Renaissance, spices dropped out of French cuisine. It was the halcyon days for sauces, which proliferated. Slow-cooked sauces were invented using fonds, mirepoix, butter and flour for thickening. Simple jus and coulis became common. Recipes for green sauces from Italy using new ingredients and herbs were also popular and easy to make since herbs were plentiful and grew wild in even the coldest parts of France.

It was La Varenne in the seventeenth century who started precisely defining sauces and how they’re made and documented roux, which then consisted of a paste of flour and lard for thickening. Instead of calling on readers to prepare meat-centric dishes with heavy Oriental spices, which were a sign of wealth and nobility at the time, La Varenne encourages readers to increase produce or meat’s flavor with a sauce—not hide it. His dishes rely on parsley, onions, leeks, and shallots, which are still oft-used ingredients in French cuisine today. And just as chefs are relearning today, seasonal vegetables deserve to be the center of a dish, according to La Varenne, and sauces should only complement their flavor. “When I eat Cabbage soup, I want it to taste like cabbage,” La Varenne wrote.

At the core of this cookbook is a focus on flavor, and how to complement meat and produce with simple cooking techniques and sauces. He introduces readers to bouillon, which forms the basis for more than 60 of his soups. Where chefs had been using old bread to thicken soups, La Varenne tells his readers how to mix flour and butter into a roux, penning the first recipe for béchamel sauce. Phrases like au naturel, au bleu, fonds de cuisine, and bouquet garni appear for the first time, which later find their place in iconic dishes, such as Auguste Escoffier’s truites au bleu.

Antonin Carême, founding father of French "grande, or haute, cuisine," came up with the methodology in the early 19th Century by which hundreds of sauces would be categorized under four basic sauces. These sauces were:

"Allemande" based on stock with egg yolk & lemon juice
"Béchamel" based on flour and milk
"Espagnole" is based on brown stock, beef etc.
"Velouté" based on a light broth, fish, chicken or veal. (Velouté is french for Velvety)

It wasn't until early on in the 20th Century that Master Chef Auguste Escoffier updated the classification, replacing sauce Allemande with the egg-based emulsions (Hollandaise and mayonnaise), and adding tomato.

Mother Sauces or Grand Sauces

The "Mother Sauces" - also called Grand Sauces, are the five most basic sauces in French cooking that every cook should master. A sauce which is derived from one of the mother sauces by augmenting with additional ingredients is sometimes called a "daughter sauce" or "secondary sauce." Most sauces commonly used in classical cuisine are daughter sauces. For example, Bechamel can be made into Mornay by the addition of grated cheese, and Espagnole becomes Bordelaise with the addition of reduction of red wine, shallots, and poached beef marrow.

Escoffier's five Mother Sauces are:

Escoffier's "Mother Sauces" are still taught to chefs today, and there are infinite possibilities for variations, since the sauces are all based on a few basic formulas.

. Béchamel Sauce (white, milk with flour and butter roux as thickening agent)
. Velouté Sauce (blond, light chicken, veal, fish stock, or shellfish stock thickened with flour and butter roux)
If you’ve ever made chicken pot pie you have probably made it with a velouté sauce. Made with only 3 ingredients: butter, flour, and stock.
. Espagnole Sauce (brown, made by thickening brown stock with brown roux, tomato purée and mirepoix (celery, onion and carrot) added for deeper color and flavor)
. Hollandaise Sauce/Mayonnaise (egg-based emulsions)
. Basic Tomato Sauce (red, browned salt-cured pork, mirepoix (onions, carrots, and celery), garlic, bay leaf, thyme, crushed tomatoes, and veal or chicken stock simmered for a couple of hours)

[1963] - A later classification of French sauces

"Sauces are the splendor and glory of French cooking...For while the roster of French sauces is stupendous, the individual sauces divide themselves into a half a dozen definite groups and each one in a particular group is made in the same general way...

The French Family of Sauces

White Sauces: These stem from the two cousins, bechamel and veloute. Both use a flour and butter roux as thickening agent. Bechamel is moistened with milk; veloute, with white stock made from poultry, veal, or fish.
Brown Sauces: For the brown sauces, the butter and flour roux is cooked slowly untilit turns a nut brown. Then a brown stock is added.
Tomato Sauce
Egg Yolk and Butter Sauces: Hollaindaise is the mother of this family.
Egg Yolk and Oil Sauces: These are all variations of mayonnaise.
Oil and Vinegar Sauces: Vinaigrette--French dressing--heads this family.
Flavored Butters: These include the hot butter sauces, and butters creamed with various herbs, seasonings or purees."
---Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, Julia Child [Alfred A. Knopf:New York] 1963 (p. 54-55)

Sauces (French) vs Gravies (British)

In British cuisine, gravy is a traditional sauce used on roast dinner, which traditionally comprises roast potatoes, roast meat, boiled, steamed or roasted vegetables and, optionally, Yorkshire pudding, which are usually only eaten with beef. The sole survivor of the medieval bread-thickened sauces, bread sauce is one of the oldest sauces in British cooking, flavoured with spices brought in during the first returns of the spice missions across the globe and thickened with dried bread.

There is a huge difference between gravy and a sauce. Gravies are made in the skillet or pan from the drippings of cooked meats, then thickened with flour, cornstarch or arrowroot. Whereas sauces have to stand on their own, not relying on the meat fat or meat tidbits for flavor - they have to enhance the meat, fish, vegetables whatever on their own. Sauces do thicken and have body, but are not thick and heavy. Sauces can be bold, or subtle, but always lighter in taste and calories than gravies.