List-making 101
I suspect I’ve said this elsewhere but, as a doddering old pedant, I’ll risk saying it again. I have always read everything I could get my hands on. It has been one long disorganized attempt to get some understanding of the universe—and my place in it. Naturally, the latter is the main driving force, for what do we really have beyond our own egos?
Since, for a long time, the only books I wrote were about food (or, more specifically, food history), their ego-driven aspect might not have been obvious. With the last food book I wrote, I tried to make sense of the vast number of sauces in the world—sauces that might, or might not, have anything to do with the classic mother sauces of French cuisine. In order to do that, I had to address the issue of taxonomy—the science that attempts to categorize and establish the connections between things in nature.
I’m willing to admit that sauces do not normally appear in nature—but they were created by people, and people are part of nature (whether we’re a good part of it or not). For the sake of argument, let’s just accept that the methods of taxonomy can be stretched to be applied to the study of sauces.
OK?
The excerpt that follows is from Sauces Reconsidered: Après Escoffier—a book that may, or may not, be the last food book I ever write. One can never be certain of anything, of course, but my taste in writing seems to have shifted in other directions (to fiction, where one’s ego is given freer rein).
The odd thing about that book is that—while I do not consider myself to be an academic—I learned by accident that the American Library Association’s Choice Review listed it as one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles List for 2019.” Many years ago, I met Paul Bocuse. At the time, he addressed me as “chef.” Needless to say, I did not correct him and took the unintended compliment at face value. I will accept the American Library Association’s unmerited compliment in the same fashion. I will, however, pose as an academic by appending a short list of books quoted in the excerpt.
Sauces Reconsidered might be seen as a kind of swan song. I can accept that; I’ve been called worse things than “dying swan.”
Chapter 3: A Taste for Order
The desire for systematic thought and the imposition of logical structure on the world really took off with The Enlightenment. Following the Novum Organum of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the encyclopedists, under Denis Diderot (1713-1784), assembled the massive Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, and Linnaeus (1707-1778) invented biological taxonomy. The desire for order—and for understanding the underlying principles that reveal connections between everything we experience, or help us to distinguish between similar things—was, clearly, in the air during the so-called “long eighteenth century.”
This led to the “natural philosophy” of the ancients evolving into something like what we call “science.” Alchemy, for example, matured into chemistry. Whereas the alchemists wanted to extract the essence of things—essentially discarding the gross corporeal substance in favor of its rarified spirit (the retort, used for distilling, is practically a symbol for the alchemist’s art), cooks of the sixteenth century began to see things differently.
The French reined in alchemy to serve the sensual table, literally debasing the spiritual essences. Similarly, the new science reined in and co-opted alchemy by taking over its technological base while jettisoning its cosmological assumptions. Cookery forced Paracelsian ideas into sensual submission, much as science checked them by cutting the occult web of influences. (Peterson, pp. 193-194)
In cooking, recipes had been collected for over a millennium with little thought about how they were related to one another. The minds of The Enlightenment must have seen that as a fundamental weakness. Consider Diderot’s entry on Sauce:
Liquid composition in which cooks cook various types of dishes, or which they make separately to eat with meat when they are cooked. Our modern sauces are rather known, but perhaps it will be helpful to find here some of the cooking sauces of our ancestors that Monsieur Sauval has described in his antiquities of Paris. These sauces are yellow sauce, hot sauce, compote sauce, mustard sauce or galantine, sauce rapée, green sauce, and finally camelaine.
Yellow sauce was made with white pepper, which our forefathers named jaunet. It was part of a number of hot sauces. In compote sauce, black pepper is used.
Mustard sauce or galantine was made with the root of this plant, which our botanists no longer know. It was perhaps nothing other than the horseradish we presently put into our sauces and which is neither less hot nor less spicy than galantine.
Sauce rapée was made with verjuice of grapes or green currants.
Green sauce (which we still know) had among other ingredients ginger and verjuice, and was made green with parsley juice or green wheat. Next white bread crumbs were added.
Regarding camelaine, which took its name from medicinal plant we no longer know, it was made with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mustard seed, wine, verjuice, bread, and vinegar. As such it was the most complex of all the sauces of that time.
The right to make and sell sauces once belonged to merchant-spicers, who consequently took the name spicers-apothecaries-saucers. But since then, the name and the product have passed to master-vinegarists, who still at present count among their qualities that of master-saucer.
Sauce robert, as a cook’s term, is onions seasoned with mustard and cooked in the fat of a pork loin or other cut which has been mixed with the sauce dabbed on it.
Cooks also call green sauce a sauce made with green wheat, toast, pepper, and salt, all ground together and passed through a cloth. (Jaucourt, n.p.)
Only Sauce Robert is even recognizable to us today. According to legend, it was invented in the early seventeenth century, and gets its name from saucier Robert Vinot. What’s significant about Sauce Robert is its incorporation of butter, an ingredient that was to become an iconic ingredient in French sauce cookery.
Butter is not found in recipes for sauces in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century cookery works from England, France, or Italy, but it does begin to appear there in the first half of the sixteenth century. Eight percent of the recipes for sauces in Le Livre fort excellent contain butter. It appears in 39 percent of La Varenne’s sauce recipes and climbs to 55 percent of Menon’s in La Cuisière bourgeoise. (Peterson, p. 193)
As a first attempt at grappling with the complexities of sauce taxonomy, Diderot’s entry is barely acceptable for our use. Not only are most of these sauces unfamiliar to us, the entry itself lacks the kind of intellectual rigor we would expect from—say—Linnaeus.
Works Cited
Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. “Sauce.” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. (trans. Sean Takats) (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006). Online at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/. Accessed 31 August 2016.
Peterson, T. Sarah. Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking. (Ithaca and London, 1994).
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