The art of the sauce
It is the final flourish of paint the thing that makes a dish the mighty, magnificent sauce.
Years spent at culinary college, hundreds of thousands of rand spent on setting up your restaurant. A lifetime of expertise devoted to making a beautiful sauce, using the stock you cooked all day, then reducing it with wine and again with liqueur, and yet again with cream. And that, chef – that little drizzle? That’s all the sauce I get?
For all their awards and expertise, some chefs are really mean with a sauce. A miserly little drizzle of sauce on your plate and the waiter’s off to the next table. I beckon them back and ask for a small jug of it. A proud chef will not mind; they’ll bask in the warm glow of approval. There’s nothing like a sauce to set a great chef apart from an also-ran. And they know it.
Why be so mean with a sauce? The answer they love to trot out is they don’t want to “mask” the other flavours. Well, thank you for your consideration, but I’ll be the judge of that. And that’s a very convenient argument, for the chef. Not so much for the diner.
My classicist friend reminds me that chefs have gone into this ungenerous mode “ever since [Paul] Bocuse moved away from the heavy classical sauces of Escoffier”. Or, ever since restaurateurs became more focused on the bottom line than they are on increasing the girth of your bottom.
The great Richard Olney in his classic The French Menu Cookbook spends pages on sauces. If you wondered what a brown sauce was, Olney sets it out beautifully, as ever with a wry touch.
“Escoffier defines sauce demi-glace as an ‘Espagnole brought to the extreme limit of perfection that it is susceptible of receiving, after a final cleansing (dépouillement)’. In today’s kitchens, demi-glace and Espagnole are the same thing except that the latter (like ‘brown sauce’ or ‘brown gravy’), thanks to a long history of careless or mendacious execution, has acquired a bad name, with the result that, no matter what the degree of perfection, a brown sauce is now most often called ‘demi-glace’ in English and French alike.”
Olney wrote this in the early 1970s. “Whatever its name,” he continues, “it continues to be attacked by some on the grounds that it makes everything taste alike. The only possible answer is that, obviously, it should not be used in everything.”
Can’t you just hear the sarcastic intonation in that, the cocked brow and flick of the hair? Those careless Philistines have ruined the tradition of a perfectly good flour-based sauce. Olney warms to his theme: “There is a movement afoot, fancied by protagonists to be purist, to cast flour from the kitchen – it has been pronounced an evil presence in all sauces.”
He goes on to eviscerate the ensuing flourless sauce. “The nouvelle demi-glace is a reduction of stock or braising juices that depends entirely on the liquid’s natural gelatine for its body. The degree of reduction necessary to attain this body falls just short of that for a Sauce de Viande [meat glaze]; the intellectual purity of intent is betrayed by a suffocating concentration of taste and a gluey excess of gelatine.”
The brown sauce he refers to is made by sprinkling flour on the meat and vegetables that have been browned in the pot, deglazed and covered with liquid, and simmered gently until braised, then “strained and cleansed”.
A cream sauce made with wine and/or other liquor such as brandy or liqueur can be truly spectacular, but wine can be used much more speedily and highly effectively simply by using it to deglaze a pan in which meat has been roasted, reduced