HISTORY OF SAUCE

I was going over my culinary manual, you know the ones they give you at culinary school? Well, the book is huge, and weighs a ton, you can do curls with it, or even some bench presses. The book is called On Cooking by Labensky and Hause the 4th edition.

I'll go over the part on page 231 called A Saucy History, but I'll tweeeeek it so as to be my own words. Let's see how it goes.

First of all, the student chef is always being tested on the basics of cooking, food safety, knife skills, nutrition, dry heat cooking, moist heat cooking, salads, desserts, blah blah blah! But one area a chef needs to master is flavoring. Learning how to flavor a dish is the ultimate test a chef needs to pass. Okay, sauces are something all chefs need to learn, and it is a very wide wide subject, sauces are made by every ethnic group, lots of people from all over the world make sauces. But how da hell did sauces come about?

The word sauce is based on a Latin word salus, this means "salted" and for ages, salt has been a basic condiment that sparks foods, or on the other hand masks its flavors. Nuts huh? In ancient Rome, cooks flavored dishes with garum, it is a golden colored sauce that is made from fermented fish entrails (wo!) mixed with brine, water and wine or vinegar. Hey the Filipinos use this don't they? Patis? And the Romans referred to a sauce called (single) a concoction of oil, wine and brine, that when it was boiled with saffron, and herbs, it was called a (double sauce). The Byzantines further developed the sauce by adding in pepper, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and coriander, or this thing called (spikenard) which is an aromatic ointment designed from grains.

Check this out, it says in the book that Medieval chefs took to either very spicy or sweet and sour sauces, used for roasted meat. And they used powdered cinnamon, mustard, red wine, and honey to make sauces sweet. They would add stale bread as a thickening agent, man that sucks, imagine today if I had to use bread to thicken a black bean sauce? What a waste, I want to eat the bread even if it is stale, I'm broke, stale bread is okay in my book. But that's what they did back then. And they also added the juice from unripe grapes to stocks, because of its acidity. Other fruit juices were added to it as well, also flower petals and herbs and spices, maybe to hide the salty tastes of cured meats, or meats that weren't too fresh. Ever seen that Seinfeld episode where George Castansa's dad Frank had a flash back and he was in the army cooking for the troops? Well, he came across some old stale meat, but decided to mask the taste with lots of herbs and spices, and at the end of the scene, the troops ate the meat, but one by one in slow motion, they all got sick and started to barf?

Well there's some historic chefs that was the sauce masters. One of them was Guillaume Tirel (1312-1395) he called himself Taillevent. This guy was a chef for Charles V of France, woopty freeking doo! He also wrote a book entitled Le Viandier, story has it that it's the oldest known French cookbook, includes 17 sauces, one of them is a blueprint for cameline sauce, it is made from grilled bread soaked in wine, and this item is then drained, and squeezed dried, and then it is ground with cinnamon, ginger, pepper, cloves and nutmeg, and then it is diluted with vinegar. And there was a sauce called taillemaslee, it is made with fried onions, verjuice, vinegar and mustard, hmmm, not bad I think I could handle that.

Okay my hands are numb from typing, I'll continue later on this history lesson on sauces.

Laters Craters!