Restaurants: The Five Mother Sauces
The sound of horses clopping on cobblestone streets in the night air. The sight of women in voluminous skirts and men with stockings up to their knees. The smells of Paris – well, let’s just say it wasn’t all the fragrance of baking bread. Napoleon III had not yet introduced the irrigation and water supply into Paris, which then grew into a street washing system that is still a wonder. Haussman had not yet designed the broad boulevards with the distinctive Parisian building style, and so much of Paris was made up of putrid, infected, squalid homes built one upon another since the Middle Ages. Dung and rotting mess was in the streets, along with rats.
Yet Parisian finery still persisted, a descendant from the era of Louis XIV, and fine ladies and gentlemen alighted to and from their horse-drawn carriages. Josephine Bonaparte continuously held the greatest salon in the world at Versailles.
Careme’s Paris was alive with creativity.
It was the era of Chef Marie Antoine Careme, and he was a genius whose legacy lives on into modern cuisine around the world.
One of his greatest contributions: the Five Mother Sauces
Chef Marie Antoine-Careme refined and developed the five Mother Sauces in the early to mid-1800s, sauces which were then further codified by Chef Auguste Escoffier into what would be the backbone and mother from which other sauces could then be made.
The history of the word ‘sauce,’ is that it comes from the Latin salsas, which means flavored with salt. The ancient Roman sauce, called Garum, was basically a fish sauce since it was made from the liquid from heavily salted and fermented fish. This was combined with brine, water, vinegar or wine. Commonly added to this were heavy quantities of spice and scented sauces. The heavy use of spices and aromatics was often used well into the Middle Ages to cover up any rotting food smell and taste. Marinades were often used as well for flavor and to tenderize the meats.
It was Francois Pierre La Varenne who elevated the sophistication of French cuisine, bringing it out of the Middle Ages’ reliance on spices and fermented foods into the use of a fresher array of ingredients. He was the foremost member of a group of French chefs, writing for a professional audience, who codified French cuisine in the age of King Louis XIV. (Louis XIV, Louis-Dieudonné; 5 September 1638 – 1 September 1715), also known as Louis the Great (Louis le Grand) or the Sun King (le Roi Soleil),) The other chefs were Nicolas Bonnefon, Le Jardinier françois (1651) and Les Délices de la campagne (1654), and Francois Massialot, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (1691), which was still being edited and modernized in the mid-18th century. The cookbook was still used in France until the French Revolution.
The seventeenth century saw a culinary revolution which transported French gastronomy into the modern era. The heavily spiced flavors inherited from the cuisine of the Middle Ages were abandoned in favor of the natural flavors of foods. New vegetables like cauliflower, asparagus, peas, cucumber, and artichoke were introduced. The 18th century gave birth to the great Chef Marie Antoine Careme.
The Five Mother Sauces:
1. Bechamel: Milk, flour, butter
Bechamel is a simple sauce using a roux. You will only need butter, flour, milk, and a little salt. Melt butter over a medium heat. Sprinkle the measured flour over the butter in the pan. Cook it down until it is a light color. You don’t want to burn the butter. Reduce the heat to low and gradually add the milk, very slowly so that the milk will not curdle. Stir frequently so that there are no lumps. Add salt.
2. Hollandaise: Clarified butter, egg yolks
All you’ll need for this sauce are six ingredients.
Egg Yolks – 3 eggs
Lemon Juice – 1 tablespoon
Dijon – 1 teaspoon
Salt – 1/4 teaspoon
Cayenne Pepper – just a pinch
Butter- 1/2 cup of melted butter
Melt the butter in a microwave for about 1 minute until hot. Combine the egg yolks, lemon juice, dijon, salt and cayenne pepper into a high-powered blender and blend for 5 seconds. Slowly stream in the hot butter into the mixture as the blender is running.
Pour the sauce into a small bowl and drizzle over your meal!
3. Valoute: simmer white stock with roux (roux is equal parts butter and flour)
3 Tbsp butter
3 Tbsp flour
2 cups chicken stock
Salt
Freshly ground white pepper
In a saucepan, over medium heat, melt the butter. Stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes. Whisk in the stock, 1/2 cup at a time. Whisk until smooth. Season with salt and pepper. Bring the liquid to a boil and reduce the heat to low and cook for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and serve.
4. Espagnole: basic brown sauce thickened with roux
This classic brown sauce is used as the base of a number of sauces that are served with meat or poultry, including Bordelaise, Robert, Chasseur, Madeira, Estragon and Diable. The key to sauce espagnole is to slowly cook the roux so it becomes brown without burning. You can begin with clarified butter, which has a high smoke point.
Directions
Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium-low heat. Whisk in the flour to make a smooth paste. Cook, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon and lowering the heat as needed to prevent burning, until the roux is several shades darker than peanut butter, 18 to 20 minutes.
Stir in the carrots, celery and onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions begin to soften, about 3 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste, then whisk in the white wine and cook until the mixture thickens, 1 to 2 minutes. Don’t worry if the vegetables get stuck in the whisk; as you add more liquid, they will release and combine with the sauce. Whisk in the stock, 1 cup at a time, and lower the heat to a simmer.
To make a sachet, place the peppercorns, parsley, thyme and bay leaves and in a square of cheesecloth and tie it into a bundle with kitchen twine. Submerge the bouquet garni in the sauce.
Simmer the sauce, using a spoon to skim off any fat or scum that rises to the surface, until it reduces by half and has the consistency of gravy, 30 to 45 minutes.
Remove the sachet, then strain the sauce through a fine-mesh sieve or cheesecloth. Use as desired as a base for sauces.
5. Classic Tomate Sauce: tomato sauce with roux
While most tomato sauces are described as Italian cuisine, the French have their own classic tomato sauce, Sauce Tomat.
The sauce starts with lightly browning diced salt-cured pork, followed by softening the mirepoix (The French flavor base called mirepoix is a combination of onion, carrot and celery generally cut to the same size. It’s used in a ratio that’s 2 parts onion to 1 part celery and carrot. Finely chopped onions, carrots, and celery) for a few minutes. Add garlic, a bay leaf, a few sprigs of thyme, whole tomatoes crushed in a bowl, and stock. Cover the pot and pop it in the oven for a slow simmer.
The sauce needs time to simmer, a couple of hours to build and concentrate all of those flavors, but that can be done in the oven.
It is not like a chunky marinara sauce; it’s creamy and tastes intensely of tomatoes