Five Sauces of French Cuisine

Learn to steer through the world of sauces, and you’ve added many arrows to your culinary
quiver: a selection of sauces can transform any number of ingredients into any number of
glorious dishes. The best guarantor of happy diners are sauces that are egg-based. Thick,
creamy, and with that umami kick that causes mouths to drool at the very thought, they go with
just about anything, and are a safe bet for any palate.
Multifaceted, sauces are surprisingly easy to make, but for some reason, few home cooks do.
Of these, the most famous are the “-aises:” mayonnaise, béarnaise, hollandaise. Each begins
with an egg and oil (or butter)-based emulsion. A bit of chemistry (as we explained here), a
good deal of whipping, and you can make show-stopping sauces at home.
WHAT IS MAYONNAISE?
Mayonnaise as a term first appears in the famous 1806 cookbook by Alexandre Viard, though
he doesn’t give a recipe for mayonnaise. There is no documentary evidence that the sauce
existed prior to the 19th century. That’s not to say that it didn’t, but its origin stories are
apocryphal. One version of its genesis, from Larousse Gastronomique, says that the term
comes from the old French, moyeu, meaning egg yolk. That sounds plausible, as does the story
that it comes from the Catalan word, maonesa, named after the town of Mahon in Menorca,
Spain. The first recorded recipe comes in 1815, when Louis Eustache Ude wrote a recipe that
was for an aspic, served nearly frozen, so it bore little relation to what we think of as the world’s
favorite condiment today. Viard followed up with an 1820 recipe which featured “veal brain
glaze”—probably delicious, but not the most encouraging ingredient for vegetarians and wary
eaters. But the process for making that sauce was on the mark: “Take a raw egg yolk in a small
terrine, with a little salt and lemon juice. Take a wooden spoon, turn it while letting a trickle of oil
fall, stirring constantly. As your sauce thickens, add a little vinegar.”
This is the miracle of mayo: raw egg yolk plus lemon juice plus a trickle of oil and a lot of stirring
equals unctuous, creamy sauce. At first you wouldn’t think that egg plus oil could create a thick
sauce, but lecithin and protein from the egg yolks act as emulsifiers and the alchemy is
complete. It is somewhat messy to make homemade mayonnaise, but no more so than dozens
of other dishes. So why do so few of us make it? Hellman’s may be partly to blame—it’s
delicious, inexpensive, and can be found anywhere in the world. We tend not to make
homemade ketchup either, because it’s so easy and cheap to get decent factory-made versions.
But there’s nothing like the homemade variety, whether made with a whisk, fork, mortar and
pestle, or electric mixer.
MAYO-BASED SAUCES
Mayonnaise is a base for scores of other sauces, usually created by simply adding one
component to the finished mayo. Add mustard to mayo and you’ve got remoulade. Add ketchup
and you’ve got Marie Rose sauce, or Russian dressing—add sweet pickle relish to that for
Thousand Island dressing. Add buttermilk and chives, and you’ve got Ranch dressing. Add
pickled cucumbers and onions for tartar sauce. Add garlic for aioli. Add saffron and paprika to
aioli, and you’ve got rouille.
HOW TO MAKE BEARNAISE AND HOLLANDAISE
If you’re feeling a bit fancy, there are two mayonnaise alternatives to add to your saucy arsenal:
béarnaise and hollandaise. While mayo is egg yolks plus oil (usually olive oil, sometimes
sunflower), béarnaise and hollandaise feature egg yolks plus clarified butter. Add a bit of white
wine and lemon juice for hollandaise, a sauce most often associated with eggs benedict but a
treat on asparagus, broccoli, salmon, or just about anything you can think of. Its origins are said
to be based on a sauce made for the King of the Netherlands’ visit to France, hence the name.
With hollandaise on hand, add shallots pepper, tarragon and chervil to make béarnaise, with its
origins in the Bearn province of France, a delight atop steak frites. Bearnaise sauce was
invented by chef Jean-Louis-François Collinet, of the famous restaurant outside of Paris, Le
Pavillon Henri IV, which opened in 1836. Collinet was born in the Bearn region, and most food
historians say that béarnaise is his brainchild.
But the beauty of béarnaise, like mayonnaise, is that it is a base for other sauces to spice up
your cooking options. Add pureed tomatoes (but leave out the tarragon and chervil) for Choron
sauce. Add meat drippings for Foyot sauce. Swap out tarragon for mint, to dress roast lamb,
and you’ve got Paloise sauce. And if you’re a fan of Comedy Central, add a white wine
reduction to Foyot Sauce for Colbert sauce.
Hollandaise is one of the legendary chef Auguste Escoffier’s five “mother sauce recipes” in his
great cookbook, which is the bible of classic French cookery. The other “mother sauces,” so
called because they are the base of many other sauce variations, can be the subject of a future
article. But with these three sauces, the –aises, all based on egg yolk plus oil or butter, a world
of recipes opens to you.

Five Sauces of French Cuisine

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Learn to steer through the world of sauces, and you’ve added many arrows to your culinary

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