History of Sauces

Europe is only one of the parts of the world that have evolved sauces with large appeal in modern times. Nowadays, many sauces are popular far from their region of origin: Chinese soy-based sauces, thick and spiced Indian sauces, fiery Mexican salsas and chilli-thickened moles. But it was on the old continent more precisely in France that generations of chefs developed and codified sauces to what became a systematic art and an international standard.

Ancient Roman Sauces

Our first knowledge of a sauce-type of preparation comes from the Romans. A Latin poem from 25 BC, Moretum, describes a peasant farmer making a spread of pounded herbs, cheese, olive oil and vinegar, an ancestor of Pesto, that gave a pungent, salty, aromatic savour to his flatbread. A few centuries later, the Latin cook book, De Re Coquinaria, attributed to Apicius makes it clear that sauces played a major role in the dining of the Roman elite. A quarter of the recipes in this book (more than 500) are sauces recipes. It is in this book, also, that the word ius, the ancestor of juice or the French jus, appears for the first time. Apicius also sets the thickening precepts that are still in use to thickened our modern sauces: vegetable and fruit purees, nuts, egg yolks - both raw and cooked, bread, even pure starch. Flavouring was provided by about half a dozen herbs and spices, vinegar and honey are common ingredients too. Saltiness and savouriness were supplied by a type of fermented fish: the Garum.

Middle Ages

Between Apicius time and the Middle Ages not much is known about cooking. The oldest cooking manuscripts that survived were dated from the 14th century. They describe major changes in the techniques used to prepare sauces. Medieval sauces tend to use many spices. They were thickened with bread and vegetable purees, and meat started to be used as a thickening agent. Pure starch was no longer in use, cream and butter still weren't. If the texture agents haven't change much since the ancient time, the flavouring agents have. The Roman fish sauce, garum, disappeared and was replaced by vinegar and unripe grape juice: verjus. Thanks to the discovery of new worlds in the East and the Middle-East new spices made their ways into European sauces: cinnamon, ginger or grain of paradise. The introduction of almonds from the Middle-East made it the main nut used as a thickening agent.

Meat and Fish Stock Sauces - jellies, aspics

The Middle Ages is the starting point of the era of the stock - meat or fish - as the main flavouring agent. By using stocks, chefs have discovered the technique of thickening sauces by concentration, as a result they discovered that gelatin could be a peculiar but quite efficient thickening agent. It is the beginning of the savoury jellies and aspics.

The 15th century, brought another evolution in the use of stock. Chefs started to perfect their techniques of stock clarification: it was the birth of consommés. This century saw changes in the terminology of sauces too. The words sauce, coulis, soup, salsa, gravy, Jus or bouillon started to appear on cookery manuscripts.

Gravy

"The gravy that was eaten in the fourteenth century bears little resemblance to the sludgy brown liquid, as likely as not made from stock cubes or freeze-dried gravy granules, usually served up in Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was a sort of sauce or dressing for white meat or fish, and was made from their broth with some sort of thickening agent, typically ground almonds, and spices (the name itself appears to be of Old French origin, coming either from graine, meat', or from grane, an adjective derived from grain in the sense of grain of spice', with in either case a misreading of n for u or v in early manuscripts; the former etymology would relate it to greande or grenadine, now obsolete terms for small stuffed fillets of veal or poultry). The Forme of Cury, a late fourteenth-century cookery book, gives a recipe for oysters in gravy: Shell the blanched oysters, and cooke them in wine and in their own broth; strain the broth through a cloth. Take blanched almonds; grind them and mix them up with the same broth, and mix it with rice flour and put the oysters in. Put in powdered ginger, sugar, mace, and salt.' A more elaborate version of the sauce, known as gravy enforced, was enriched with boiled egg yolks and cheese, while the inferior gravy bastard seems to have been made with breadcrumbs rather than ground almonds. The common denominator between this and what we now call 'gravy' is the juice given off by meat in cooking; and the critical change between obtaining this in the form of broth, from boiling the meat, and in the form of juices produced by roasting, seems to have taken place in the sixteenth century."
---An A-Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford Univeristy Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 148-9)

Beginnings of Modern Sauces

It was in three centuries between 1400 and 1700, that the sauces of our time found their roots. Recipes of those time, call for fewer spices. Vinegar and verjus gave their place to lemon juice. The use of bread and almonds as thickening agents were replace by flour, butter and egg emulsions.

Around 1750, Chef Francois Marin incorporated his knowledge of the Chinese flavour harmony concept into his own cooking. Both Marin and a chef I Yin from ancient China, spoke of balance and harmony. I Yin would bind together sour, sweet, bitter, salty and pungent ingredients while the French chef pots would contain meat juices which would generate complexity and harmony. Francois Marin introduced the concept of the sauce as a complement that deepens and integrates the flavour of the main ingredient with the rest of the other dish. The preparation of sauce in those times required a huge amount of flesh that would not appear in the final dish. With Marin started the glorious time of rich bouillons, stocks, consommés, jus and "restaurants" that will last until the years of the "Nouvelle Cuisine" and "Fusion Cooking".

Classic French Cooking

In 1789, came the French revolution, and with it came the diminishment in the standards of kitchens of the French great houses, as less wealth meant less staff. It is then that the first fine restaurants appeared, opened by the former chefs of the bourgeois households. The impact of the French revolution was assessed by Chef Antonin Careme (1784-1833) in his book "Preliminary Discourse" to his Maitre d'hotel francais. Careme made a summary of the old, costly traditional cooking. His input to the progression of cooking and sauce making was to organize and simplify and classify what Marin foresaw.

About 200 years later, French Chef August Escoffier (1846-1935) in his Guide Culinaire attributed the eminence of French cuisine in the rest of the world directly to its sauces. In the hands of Careme and Escoffier the new way of thinking that came out of Marin's kitchen, became Classic French cooking and the cornerstone of fine dining throughout the western world. But for 40 years, Chefs just kept going around in circles in the rigid classic cooking system. They just kept on reproducing over and over the same recipe.

Nouvelle Cuisine

In the 1960's came Nouvelle Cuisine, led by Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Michel Guérard and the Troisgros Family and later on, Joel Robuchon. This new concept allow chefs' imaginations to flourish and asserted the virtues of freshness, economy and simplicity. The main aspect of the Nouvelle Cuisine was that the food was to be served intact instead of the old ways of the food's total dissection. With the Nouvelle Cuisine came a more rational use of the sauce Espagnole that was the cornerstone of Escoffier's era. Lighter sauces, now had a place in cooking, the use of flour and butter thickening agents were to be replaced by light emulsions, dressings, flavoured oils and cooked vegetable or fruits purée.

Nowadays, Escoffier's Guide Culinaire is considered by most chefs as the cooking "Old Testament". Chefs around the world consider Le Grand Livre de Cuisine by French Chef named Alain Ducasse as the cooking "New Testament". His cooking represents the next step in the evolution of cooking and sauce making. He has been able to refine even more the old precepts and integrate, flavours from the global village we live in, as well as the new dietary needs of our modern world. [The writer thinks] that he has reached what Francois Marin and I Yin were striving for, many centuries ago: subtleness and delicacy, balance and harmony.

But, it is history in the making, so it is up to you to find who is going to write the next chapter in the history of sauces.

In other countries, we find other traditions:

British cuisine

Gravy is a traditional sauce used on roast dinner, which (traditionally) comprises roast potatoes, roast meat, boiled vegetables and optional Yorkshire puddings. The sole survivor of the medieval bread-thickened sauces, bread sauce is one of the oldest sauces in British cooking, flavored with spices brought in during the first returns of the spice missions across the globe and thickened with dried bread. Apple sauce, mint sauce and horseradish sauce are also used on meat (pork, lamb and beef respectively). Salad cream is sometimes used on salads. Ketchup and brown sauce are used on more fast-food type dishes. Strong English mustard (as well as French or American mustard) are also used on various foods, as is Worcestershire sauce, a successor to the fermented and highly flavored ancient Roman fish sauce garum. Custard is a popular dessert sauce. Some of these sauce traditions have been exported to ex-colonies such as the USA

Italian cuisine

Most popular Italian sauces are intended for pasta and there are a wide variety of them, because each one comes from a different region of Italy. The majority of them are red sauces such as siciliana from Sicily, pescatora, napoletana and pizzaiola from Naples, amatriciana and arrabbiata from Rome, ragù or bolognese from Bologna; true pesto is a green sauce based on basil, traditional in Genoa. Many of them are based on olive oil and garlic. When Italians cook pasta al forno (baked pasta) they often add besciamella (Béchamel sauce) to the basic sauce, only to give mildness to the recipe. In recent times white sauces, with cream, are growing in popularity: among them alfredo is not really Italian, but typical of Italo-Americans. In northern Italy there are popular sauces served with mixed boiled meat such as salsa rossa, a slightly hot tomato sauce; salsa verde, a green sauce based on parsley; and mostarda, syruped fruits flavored with mustard.