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Sauce Theory of the Sauces

The saying of Brillat-Savarin, that a cook can be made but that a roaster must be born, is well known. It is not so well known that his friend, the Marquis de Cussy, asked him to revise this aphorism, and that before his death he did revise it. We in England are more than all inclined to call it in question; for we find among us a scarcity of good cooks and yet an abundance of good roasters.

Probably the best of French cooks cannot roast so well as any Meg or Moll in a homely farmstead, or the trencher- Sauce man of a regimental mess. After long and anxious discussions with his friend De Cussy, the great gastronomer agreed to remodel his aphorism, and to say-" On devient cuisinier, on devient rôtisseur, on naît saucier": Cooking and roasting are things to teach; it needs genius to make a sauce. We may overwhelm the chemist of sauces with rules and receipts; they are of little use without a natural gift. To make a perfect sauce is indeed the height of culinary art; but before the reader comes to the end of this article he will be constrained to admit that the saucemaker owes, in a sense of which Brillat-Savarin had no conception, more than half of his success to a subtle skill in roasting which no ordinary cook ever possesses, and which invests with a new and unexpected meaning the celebrated aphorism in its original form.

The language of the English table suggests a distinction between sauces and gravies; and I have in my time listened to many curious discussions as to what is and what is not a sauce, what is and what is not a gravy. In common parlance, and in the chief dictionaries, gravy always means the juices of roasted meat; in the kitchen and in the cookery books it has been found necessary to extend its meaning to the juice of meat however obtained, whether from roasting or decoction. The word sauce, in its origin, is a doublet of salt; in its modern use it nearly always implies a liquid; and it may be defined in the most general terms as any liquid seasoning employed in the presentation of food. Gravy, or the juice of meat, is always a sauce, although a sauce is not always gravy. On the other hand, the great sauces, as they are called in France, have gravy for their foundation-this too in its most concentrated form; and it would be more distinctive to call them, at least in England, gravies.

The French have two leading sauces a brown and a white one-which are the Adam and Eve of all their other preparations and reductions of gravy. We need not at Sauce this point stay to inquire how the juices of meat are obtained so as to make the one brown and the other white : it must be enough to say that the one is called Espagnole or Spanish sauce, the other Velouté or Velvet-down; and to dwell for a moment on this odd fact that whereas in cookery a brown sauce is used about three times as often as a white one, the French cooks recognise only one form of the more frequent sauce, and as many as three forms of the less frequent. Brown sauce is always what they are pleased to call Spanish ; and white sauce, or Velvet-down, has two variations, which are known as Béchamel and Allemande or German. If it is curious that of the four parent sauces or gravies of the French kitchen there should be but a single brown to three white ones, it is still more so, when we consider it closely, that the one brown sauce should be called Spanish. The fact is, that the traditions of the French kitchen have been muddled and forgotten. Spanish was originally but a variation of an older brown sauce which flourished in France long before Spanish tastes began to prevail, and which was afterwards forgotten, much as if, among the white sauces, Béchamel should survive, and Velvet-down, from which it springs, should be heard of no more.

Let us ask for everything turns on this-why is the sauce called Spanish? There are people who imagine that it means no more than brown. There is a hue which goes by the name of Spanish brown: the great Spanish painter, Murillo, loved it well, and made it by roasting the bones which his countrymen boiled down in their stews. Spanish sauces, Spanish pictures, Spanish wines, Spanish faces, all seemed to have a tawny hue; and was it not natural, therefore, of the French cooks to pay a compliment to the Spanish alliance by dubbing their chief brown sauce a Spaniard? It is not necessary to run away from this view; it is natural; but it is not enough. People do not change the name of an established preparation with- Sauce out at the same time making a change, however trivial, in its character; and it is not to be supposed that the French cooks would change the name of anything so important as their chief brown sauce-La Grande Saucewithout some novelty in its nature. The novelty was this. The French brown sauce was originally worked out of the French pot-au-feu (though not in the same manner as bouillon); and to this day there are popular cookery books -that of Gogué, published by Hachette, is one-which, although calling the sauce indifferently brown or Spanish, give a receipt for the preparation of its elementary juice or gravy which is nothing more than the ordinary contents of the best beef broth worked down towards a glaze.

When the Bourbons made their way to the Spanish throne under Louis XV., and when Spanish fashions came back to Paris, the French cooks took a hint from the Spanish pot-au-feu-the olla podrida-and produced a variation of their brown sauce which they called Spanish. The essen tial principle of the French pot-au-feu was beef; the essential principle of the Spanish was bacon, ham, the red Estremadura sausage-all well smoked. There is a rhyme which says, No hay olla sin tocino Ni sermon sin Agustino, that an olla can be no more without bacon than a sermon without a quotation from St. Augustine. The Duc de St. Simon sent home marvellous accounts of the hams of Montanches; there grew up a rage for Spanish hams; and the French were not to blame, for they have no hams of their own which have any reputation. Great as they are in pig's flesh, they are poor hands at bacon and ham; and the treasures of Montanches were a revelation to them.. They ran wild after ham. There is an amusing story told of Bertrand, steward to the Prince of Soubise (see Soubise), who ordered fifty hams for a little supper which he had to prepare. Only one was to go to table; Sauce the other forty-nine were to be worked into sauces and garnitures. And so, by introducing the flavour of the Estremadura bacon and ham into the old brown sauce of the French, there came into being the Spanish sauce. It was a grand hit this the introduction of the hammy taste. The fashion spread, and the word was passed from cook to cook as a secret worth knowing, that to make the brown sauce in perfection there was nothing like a slice or two of Spanish ham. But the best Montanches porkers are fed on vipers; and a retribution followed, as though the vipers in the Spanish hams had warmed to life and poisoned the wits of the French cooks. The hams of Montanches are not too plentiful in this world of sorrow, and the cooks came to be satisfied with any ham-even with French ham, which is little better than salted pork. So the meaning of the prescription was lost; the peculiarity of the Spanish sauce passed away, and its name became a puzzle. The French ham, which is not properly smoked, went for little or nothing; and there is no clear difference between the old brown sauce and that which is now called Spanish. Then followed this folly:- The French cooks having a tradition, which they did not understand, that ham was a good thing for brown sauce, thought it must be equally good for white, and put it into their Velvet-down, where it is altogether a mistake, as will presently be shown; only as it was the tasteless French ham which was thus inserted, no result ensued except a pleasant sensation for the cooks that they were doing their work in the grand style and vindicating the title of their art to the utmost ceremony. The cooks of other nations looked on with astonishment; and seeing in the receipts that slices of ham are always to line the bottom of the stockpot, laughed at the useless niceties of the French chemistry. The fact is, that the very best brown sauce can be made without an ounce of ham or bacon; and to make the true Spanish sauce as understood by the old French cooks, a few Sauce Frankfort sausages, with their fine smoky flavour, or some of the Jewish smoked beef, or the Jewish beef sausageschorissas are of more avail than a hundredweight of French ham.

This analysis brings us back to our starting-point; and three questions arise: Are we to be content with the one brown fundamental sauce of the French books?-and are we to call it Spanish?

To get at the root of the matter, we must come to a clear understanding as to the real difference between the brown and the white, into which all gravy sauces are divided. The white sauces (which by the way are not necessarily white, for they may be tinged to any colour -yellow with the yolks of eggs or scarlet with tomatos-and yet preserve their character) are the result of decoction and no other heating process. To get a full flavour in this way, however, implies a long decoction and a reduction of much meat. And even when the sauce has been thus reduced to a white cullis, the flavour of the Velvet-down may be so flat that it requires to be enriched with nearly its own volume of cream to make a good Béchamel, or with butter and yolks of eggs to make a good German sauce. And how is brown sauce different? It may sound like a paradox to say so, but it is the simple fact, only expressed in a novel phrase that the essential difference between brown and white sauce is that in addition to the boiling and simmering processes, which produce a white sauce, the brown one has to go through a process of roasting; and that this roasting creates superlative flavour which can be obtained by very simple means. The juices of certain meats are, at a particular period of their decoction, roasted, and then submitted to a further decoction. What nonsense, it may be said, to speak of roasting a liquid! Who ever heard of roasting water? Nobody has ever been able to roast mere water; but we have all heard of burning milk, of browning butter, and a Sauce of making a sauce fall to a glaze. To understand all that is involved in browning a sauce, or in making it fall to a glaze, it is better to use a more general expression, and to say that it is roasted. If it be objected that it is not English to speak of roasting anything in a pan, the reader must be reminded of the roasted chestnuts which he can see at every street corner, and of the coffee which is roasted in a closed cylinder. sauce.

Now this roasting of coffee, with its result, affords a good illustration of what happens in the roasting of a It has never been properly explained how or why, but we all know that the roasting of coffee develops in it qualities certain salts and volatile oils, one of them with a wonderful perfume-which no amount of boiling can educe from the raw berry. In five minutes after the coffee is roasted and ground, we get with boiling water a glorious beverage, which mortal man never yet came near with unroasted coffee. And it is to be observed that the result obtained by torrefaction is not merely a change of colour and an access of fragrance, but also the development of qualities that palpably affect the human frame, and exhilarate the nervous system. There is no such extraordinary contrast in its effect upon our system between brown and white sauce; but the coffee illustration may be accepted as the most extreme statement which could be given of the difference that may be created in precisely the same ingredients by roasting and not roasting them. There is a much milder, but not less remarkable, illustration within everybody's reach. In five minutes the experiment can be made with two pats of the best butter. Take one of these and simply melt it in a ladle over a flame, making oiled butter. Take the other and roast it to a light hazel tint, making what is called nut-brown butter. The difference is astonishing. The roasting develops a fragrance in the nut-brown butter than which nothing can be more exquisite, although nothing is more simple. It is a perpetual Sauce miracle-the sudden generation by fire of a flavour which was not there before. The chemists do not explain it : their minds are occupied with much more distant matters such as tetranitronaphthalene and tungstosotungstic bromide. It would be too much to expect them to forget for a moment itamonochloropyrotartaric and hydroparacoumaric acids, to attend to anything so common as a complete statement of the chemical distinction between oiled butter and nut-brown butter. Whatever it may be that is developed by the process of roasting, it is typical of the entire difference which separates every form of brown sauce from every form of white.

Although the principle is ever the same, it is to be observed that there are many ways of introducing into brown sauce the roast flavours. 1. The most direct method of all is to create the proper flavour by roasting the sauce itself that is, to use a common expression, by boiling the juices of meat down to a glaze. This expression, however, is faulty; for it seems to convey the notion that the grand result is produced by boiling which it is not. A thin broth or gravy will roast or burn no more than water will; but it may be boiled down to such a consistence that the pan will then catch it as it catches butter, roast it, turn it to glaze, and, if care is not taken, burn it. To boil down the sauce only prepares for the change which is to follow: the decisive change is produced by roasting. A pint of good stock will boil down to but a spoonful or two of such glaze, and a very little of this will go a long way to flavour sauces and soups. 2. Another way is to put the solid ingredients of the sauce, the meat and the vegetables, into a pan with butter, to brown them for a time-that is, really, to roast them and then to boil them down either in water or bouillon. 3. A third way is to get the juices of the meat by boiling it slowly for a short time, say half an hour, in a small quantity of broth; by then stabbing the meat, to make the juices low out of it; by next boiling it Sauce rapidly, till solid and fluid roast together-that is, fall to a glaze; and finally by filling the vessel with broth or with water, and letting it simmer for hours till the decoction is perfect. 4. It is very common to finish sauces by thickening them with roux; and roux is nothing more than flour which has been roasted in butter. 5. One of the most ancient methods of the French kitchen for the perfection of a brown sauce, or a superexcellent consommé, is to roast a fowl first, or it may be two, and then to boil them down in the stockpot; and those cooks who are afraid that some goodness may depart from the fowl in roasting it before a clear fire stipulate for brazing it which is only another mode of roasting.

It will now be understood that a cook proficient in sauces must have the most delicate skill in roasting; and at the same time we reach the true meaning of the Spanish sauce. The introduction of the Spanish ham into the stockpot for brown sauce is but one out of many ways of awakening that taste of the fire which ought to mark it. Not that the ham has itself been roasted: it has only been smoked. The roast flavour in this case is the flavour of wood which has been roasted and burnt. The flavour has risen in a vapour which has been identified with creosote and pyroligneous acid, and which, seizing on the ham, has incorporated with it. This incorporation may to some extent soften and tone down the tarry flavour of charred or roasted wood; but essentially the roast flavour, which through the Spanish ham is supposed to improve a brown sauce, is a modification of the flavour of charred pinewood. Knowing this, we can rate at its true worth the direction of the French cooks to put ham into all sauces and soups which are to be very good. The introduction of ham or of anything smoked, in however faint a degree, into white sauce, is opposed to its character. It is quite possible that the creosote in the ham may be too feeble to do any harm : the question is, what good does it do? It is the nature of Sauce white sauce to be produced by decoction alone, so as to keep it quite free from any of the igneous flavours: what, then, is the object of tampering with it by putting into it an ingredient whose special value is that it has an igneous taste of a certain kind? Because two and a half centuries ago a French cook discovered that a Spanish ham mightily improved the savour of his brown sauce, we have slices of ham put into every soup and sauce and stew served at a grand dinner. See the far-reaching and unexpected consequences of great events. Because early in the last century the blood royal of France and of Spain intermingled, a Jew cannot now feast with the Lord Mayor on the ninth of November without trembling for his soul, and much smiting of conscience. I picture to myself the perplexity and despair of the greatest cook of this century, Carême, who left the service of the Prince Regent in England to take office in the household of Baron Rothschild in Paris. All the traditions of his art assured him that soups and sauces are nothing without ham-that ham is the trumpet obligato in the symphony of a sauce -and ham was denied to him. It was due to the genius of Carême that the Baron's dinner-table became the most refined in Europe; but it did not require the genius of Carême to prove that the absence of ham in the sauces made no difference.

The following is an alphabetical list of the sauces described in this volume :- Allemande.

Almond cream.

Anchovy.

Anchovy butter.

Apple.

Arrowroot.

Aspic.

Cold Béchamel.

Mock Béchamel.

Bigarade.

Black butter.

Blanquette.

Bordelese.

Brawn.

Aurora.

Bread.

Béarnaise.

Breton.

Béchamel.

Caper.

Sauer Kraut Celery.

Cruet.

Devil.

Dutch.

Duxelles.

Egg.

English.

Espagnole.

Fennel.

Financiers'.

Genevese.

German.

Oiled butter.

Orange gravy.

Parsley.

Périgueux.

Piquante.

Plum.

Poivrade.

Polish.

Poulette.

Punch.

Ravigote.

Ravigote butter.

Remoulade.

Gooseberry.

Gravy.

Robert.

Its own gravy.

Sage and onion.

Beef gravy.

Salmi.

Veal gravy.

Shalot.

Rich gravy.

Sharp.

Cold gravies.

Shrimp.

Hollandaise.

Soubise.

Horseradish.

Spanish.

Italian.

Lemon.

Lobster.

Maître d'Hôtel.

Mayonnaise.

Green Mayonnaise.

Mint.

Nut-brown butter.

Supreme.

Tartar.

Tomato.

Velvetdown.

Mock Velvetdown.

Venetian.

Venison.

White-wine.