Mother Sauces

I have almost completed a goal I've had for a year and a half: a tour of the mother sauces of French cuisine. The approach of this goal was heralded by nothing--I'd long last track of the goal in my culinary adventuring. Until a few nights ago, while reducing tomatoes to a sauce, I realized I had nearly completed the journey. All that remains is sauce béarnaise, and for that I have both reduced an infusion of shallots and tarragon in white wine and white wine vinegar, and prepared a buerre blanc eager for clarification. This seems a fair place to begin a systematic treatment of those 1.5 dozen months.

The concept of the mother sauces is central to French theory on saucemaking. Five sauces are generally considered the mother sauces: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and tomato sauce. The first three are made from roux--a paste made from equal parts hot butter and flour. The roux is cooked to an appropriate degree of darkness--white roux for béchamel, blond for velouté, brown for espagnole. Each uses a different liquid component--milk, white stock and brown stock respectively. Hollandaise is considered a mother sauce, but I take it as referring to sabayon-thickened butter sauces in general. Tomato is simply a reduction.

In the next few posts, I'll go over these in a bit more detail.

In other news, the remains of Ike blew through last night. When tropical cyclones transition to extratropical form, their structure changes. We find rain on their left side, and wind on the right side. I was fortunate enough to be on the wind side. A few branches were blown down, power flickered and was knocked out in some nearby towns. It was all quite beautiful.