Sauce Recipes

It's hard to imagine many meals that don't incorporate sauce recipes. Most of the sauces that grace our dinner tables today are there to enhance the flavor of our meal. Drawn butter sauce, for example, brings out the best is seafood, particularly lobster. Hollandaise sauce also complements eggs Benedict and other dishes without forcing out the other flavors. But sauce recipes had less noble beginnings. The word 'sauce' actually comes to us from French. Originally, it referred to a relish that made unpleasant food more palatable. Even before sauce had its name, the early Romans used a very thick, heavily seasoned sauce to cover up the often bad taste of a meal. Sauces were often used so heavy-handedly that the diner might not know exactly what he was eating. And that, I'm afraid, was the point.

Sauce Recipes Today

We have nicer needs for sauces today. A sauce gives us complementary flavor for our meat or tops off our vegetables. It provides us with something to dip our bread in, or even our fingers when the sauce is 'just that good.' Though there are countless variations for sauce recipes, they almost all start out with one of the "Mother Sauces." These are:

• Tomato - this is a tomato-based sauce with thickeners
• Bechamel - milk-based
• Espagnole - made from brown stock
• Veloute - based on white stock
• Hollandaise - derived from butter and eggs

Once you've mastered these five, all other sauce recipes will come easily to you. And we have plenty on this page to keep you busy. .