On Food and Cooking

postrevolutionary cuisine. The parent sauces
could be prepared in advance, with the novel
but minor modifications and seasonings to be
done at the last minute on the day of the meal.
As Raymond Sokolov puts it in his guide to
the classic sauces, The Saucier’s Apprentice,
these sauces were conceived as “convenience
foods at the highest level.”
Less than a century after Carême, the great
compilation of classic French cuisine,
Auguste Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire (1902),
lists nearly 200 different sauces, not including
dessert sauces. And Escoffier attributed the
eminence of French cooking directly to its
sauces. “The sauces represent the partie
capitale of the cuisine. It is they which have
created and maintained to this day the
universal preponderance of French cuisine.”
Of course this flavoring system was the
creation of the line of professional cooks
going back to medieval times. Alongside it
there developed a more modest domestic