Call it a comeback: ’cue again gets saucy
In “Apocalypse Now,” protagonist Captain Willard asks one of his crew why his nickname is “Chef.”
“See, I come from New Orleans,” he responds. “I was raised to be a saucier. A great saucier.”
“What’s a saucier?” asks Willard.
“We specialize in sauces,” answers Chef.
When I first saw the movie, I had never heard of a saucier either. In a film with many memorable scenes — including Chef coming face to face with a tiger in the jungle, spawning a “Never get out of the boat” meme — the saucier comments stuck with me for some reason.
When the film was released in 1979, sauciers had become something of an endangered species. Starting in the mid-1960s, a culinary trend known as “nouvelle cuisine” was sweeping through Europe. The heavy sauces that drowned many of the dishes in European haute cuisine were on the way out, replaced by simple preparations and presentations that celebrated the quality and “integrity” of the ingredients.
Does this aversion to sauces sound familiar? Certainly, the defining characteristic of Central Texas-style barbecue is a “no sauce needed” mantra; the glory of Texas beef needs no embellishment other than salt, pepper and post oak smoke.
Of course, there is no direct connection between nouvelle cuisine and Texas barbecue, although many French chefs and diners have recently taken an interest in one of the Lone Star State’s most important culinary exports.
We can blame this contemporary antipathy for sauces on the advent of refrigeration. The conventional wisdom is that sauces were developed to mask the foul taste of spoiled meat in the days before it could be preserved. With the spread of modern refrigeration, meats spoiled less frequently, thus negating the need for sauces.
One of the earliest recipes for a sauce comes from ancient Rome, where traces of a fermented fish sauce known as garum are still occasionally scraped from the insides of recently discovered amphorae pots. Think of garum as the ancient Roman equivalent of ranch dressing.
Today, garum is making a comeback. In Houston, Coltivare restaurant offers a delicious, addictive bowl of mussels doused in garum. Sopping up that sauce with the excellent focaccia bread is a “last meal” experience for me.
Spring forward a couple of millennia, and we find French chefs, pre-nouvelle cuisine, establishing the five “mother sauces” of classical cuisine: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomato and hollandaise.
The last, hollandaise, is made of egg yolks and melted butter. Nowadays, we know it as the sauce that goes on our Eggs Benedict at brunch. More important, for our purposes, hollandaise begat a spin-off sauce — béarnaise — which became the traditional accompaniment to beef, specifically the French dish known as steak frites.
In Houston, my favorite application of béarnaise sauce is the dish known as Steak Oscar. This is usually a center-cut filet mignon topped with béarnaise and a big dollop of jumbo lump crabmeat. Steak and crabmeat may seem like an incongruous combination, but the sauce brings it all together. My favorite Steak Oscar is at the original Brenner’s Steakhouse.
What about barbecue sauce? Certainly, the purists still advocate for no sauce, especially in Central Texas-style barbecue. But sauces are making inroads here, too. Franklin Barbecue in Austin and Killen’s Barbecue in Pearland are well known for their barbecue sauces made with coffee. Luling City Market is known for its South Carolina-inspired, mustard-based barbecue sauce. Feges BBQ offers an “Alabama white sauce” made with mayonnaise that is traditionally served with the barbecue of its eponymous state.
And what about the sauces of New Orleans and Louisiana, where the “Apocalypse Now” Chef character was from? No shortage there. It would be heresy to eat boudin without a few dashes of Crystal hot sauce. Garlic sauces such as Cajun Power are prevalent throughout the state. And if there is a mother sauce of Louisiana, it has to be Tabasco.