Foodie Word: Mother Sauce

The first part of this week’s “foodie word(s)” is one we all know: sauce. But what does the Epicurious.com food dictionary have to say about this culinary staple?

Sauce (n)- a thickened, flavored liquid designed to accompany food in order to enhance and bring out its flavor

I don’t know about you, but that seems like a pretty broad definition to me! If virtually ever liquid accompanying food is a sauce, shouldn’t there be some type of classification system to help us keep things straight?

The 19th-century French chef Antonin Carême sure thought so. He evolved an intricate methodology by which hundreds of sauces were classified under one of the five "mother sauces." The mothers are:

1. Espagnole- brown (beef or veal) stock-based
2. Velouté- light (chicken or fish) stock-based
3. Béchamel (basic white sauce)
4. Hollandaise and mayonnaise (emulsified sauces)
5. Vinaigrette (oil-and-vinegar combinations)

This classification system comes in handy for several reasons, namely that, when you’re in the kitchen, having a methodology to follow is essential for allowing experimentation. There is a basic mayonnaise recipe that all chefs learn and, once you know the ingredient ratios and emulsification technique, you can flavor that mayo a thousand ways (see: mayo, curried). Same with vinaigrette—you don’t have to be a foodie to know that the dressing pops up on virtually every restaurant menu in one form or another. But a chef can never arrive at a blueberry, walnut vinaigrette (served over mesclun with fresh chèvre—yum) if he doesn’t know the technique.

So you see, readers, why we owe a great debt to Antonin. Without him, how would we ever have arrived at sauce hybrids like aioli and brown butter? I shudder to think of a world without them!