Sauces in French Cuisine

Excerpt from the Table of Contents:

– Basics

– Basic brown sauces, including their variations

– Tomato sauces

– White sauces, including their variations

– Butter sauces

– Warm English sauces

– Cold sauces

– Jellies and aspics

– Butter mixtures and flavoured oils

This book explicitly does not have any creative aspirations. Rather, it is to be understood as a window of opportunity to look back at times when French Cuisine and its developments had been brought together to form one binding basis, and consider one section thereof.

Sauces, the backbone of French Cuisine, serve one main purpose: accompanying, underlining and strengthening the dishes’ characteristic taste and nature. Only those who have come to understand the width of the “old” basis can, by way of comparison, recognize the extent to which the original diversity has vanished.

Important to know: this book “only” focuses on sauces found in French Cuisine up and until the mid of the 20th century, as collected by Auguste Escoffier and published by him in 1903 in his “Guide Culinaire”. This collection of sauces by Escoffier is still a reference, even 100 years later. They have never been modified or doubted or even proven wrong.