on a Van Gogh self-portrait; complete. It is, of course,

with the scraping up of all the sticky bits at the bottom of the pan, and poured over the meat.

You can whip one up in minutes or spend days making one. Fast or slow, hot or cold or, for that matter, room temperature. You could spend a lifetime making a different sauce every day and yet have learnt to make only a fraction of all the possibilities in the world. The Béchamel. The classic French tomato sauce. The Velouté, the Espagnole, the Hollandaise, the French mother sauces.

For a great chef, a sauce may be the final product of many processes. To make Marco Pierre White’s Sauce Diable (recommended for offal), you’ll need first to have made a good beef stock from scratch and a good chicken stock, and then make a Diable reduction, which involves reducing white wine and white wine vinegar with peppercorns, thyme, bay leaves and shallots, which is then rested and strained, and only then start to make the Sauce Diable. This requires caramelising chicken winglets in olive oil, cooking them further with shallots and garlic, adding mushrooms, thyme and bay and cooking more, adding peppercorns and the Diable reduction, simmering and then adding the two stocks, simmering for half an hour and passing it through muslin. It’s reduced again, to a coating consistency, and then you cook diced shallot in butter, dice more butter, and mix the last two into the reduced sauce. Et voilà! – Sauce Diable.

A Marco Pierre White book is a good thing to have as he’s all about the basics. In my Canteen Cuisine by MPW, you’ll find the perfect beurre blanc and Hollandaise, the Velouté and the Béarnaise. There’s also your gribiche (cold sauce of boiled eggs, capers, gherkins, tarragon, parsley and olive oil), Sauternes (a cream sauce made with sweet white wine), and aigre-doux, a sweet-and-sour sauce of red wine and red wine vinegar with garlic and shallots, made with veal stock, and recommended for tuna.

The early 1970s seems to have been a good time for books about sauces. Hamlyn’s Guide to Sauces and Sauce-making by Sonia Allison was first published in 1970. Succinctly, she places sauces firmly in three categories.

“Almost every known sauce is a variation of a basic recipe and the great classics stem either from Béchamel, Velouté or Suprême (the white group), from Espagnol or Spanish (the brown group) or from Hollandaise and Mayonnaise (the egg group).” Every classic is here, from Maître d’Hôtel (butter sauce for white fish) to Chaud-Froid, which “literally means hot-cold sauce; hot Béchamel sauce mixed with cold savoury jelly, such as aspic. When the sauce has cooled and thickened sufficiently to coat the back of a spoon, it is then used to coat cold buffet-type foods.” Today, the cold sauces on your hotel buffet are more likely to have come out of a bottle.

In our own kitchens, we can make it a project to learn how to make a range of classic sauces, thereby becoming better cooks, better hosts (what’s on our dinner party plates can only improve), and the better we get at this, the better we’ll be able to tell the difference, when dining out, between a sauce that the chef clearly could have cared less about, and a great one.

The one that will be drizzled on your plate while you glare at the waiter as he sashays to the next table, to pour the rest of your sauce on to someone else’s plate.