On Food and Cooking

an attractive appearance. Many sauces are
nondescript, but others have the vibrant color
of their parent fruit or vegetable, or the depth
of tone that comes with roasting and long
cooking. Some have an attractive sheen, and
some are intriguingly transparent. The visual
beauty of a sauce is a sign of the care with
which it was made, a suggestion of intensity
and clarity of flavor and of presence on the
tongue: an anticipation of pleasures to come.
There are several basic ways of making
sauces. Many of them involve disrupting
organized plant and animal tissues and freeing
the juices that carry their flavor. Once
extracted from their source, the juices can be
combined with other flavorful materials, and
then often benefit from thickening to help
them linger on the food and in the mouth. The
cook thickens juices by filling them with a
variety of large molecules or particles that
obstruct the flow of the water molecules.
Most of this chapter deals with different