Posted: 7/2/2025 11:55:51 PM EDT
[Last Edit: TheLineIsReady][Edited]
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I’ve enjoyed cooking for a long time and dove heavily into smoking meats for a few years, but I’ve been coming back to the stovetop and oven more over the past year. I've never felt that I had a solid foundation in kitchen cooking, though. I could cook by numbers, but the process and ingredients seemed somewhat random and abstract until recently, when I found myself gravitating towards French cuisine. Why French? For starters, it’s been a simple process of elimination. I don’t generally care for Mexican food, nor do I really care for pasta too much to say that I like Italian, and various Asian food doesn't really do it for me (except for good sushi). I still eat them, and even make them from time to time, but I never crave them. (Personal preference, that’s all.) Another reason is that I've found every French dish I’ve tried to be amazing. It was also Jack Croft and Will Murray, the entrepreneurs behind Fallow of London, who really kick-started my interest in French cuisine. Their Youtube channel was the gateway to my rabbit hole. https://www.youtube.com/@FallowLondon https://fallowrestaurant.com/recipes/ Then I learned that French cuisine relies heavily on the foundational elements of five (5) mother sauces, going back hundreds of years in some cases, which were incorporated into Chef Marie-Antoine Carême’s description of four (4) mother sauces in 1833, with Auguste Escoffier adding hollandaise in his 1907, Le Guide Culinaire, A guide to Modern Cookery. These, I learned, are the bases to form more complex daughter sauces. This building block approach has helped to compartmentalize cooking for me. I'm also finding patterns and repetitions. Create a roux. Caramelize mirepoix. Reduce sauce, etc. This has helped me to find order and understand it better. Learning the history of French cuisine has also been interesting in itself. Another help for me, was my wife’s gift of Julia Child’s, Mastering the Art of Frech Cuisine, which not only demystifies French cuisine in a very down to earth manner, but provides direct replacements for meat cuts and ingredients that are largely unobtainable in the US. Though it was first published in 1961 and updated in 1983 with the advent of the food processor, it is just as relevant today as ever. My wife gave it to me recently, and I haven't been able to put it down.  Below, I’ll present the five mother sauces in brief detail, along with a few of their derivatives that I’ve tried. I’m very much a neophyte, so discussion and critiques are very much appreciated as French cooking is a skill set that I'd like to learn well. What are your favorites? What are some other must tries? 1. Béchamel– The simplest and quickest sauce to prepare. It’s a white sauce, consisting of a white roux and milk. Soubise is a daughter sauce, with the addition of onion. Pan Seared Salmon with Soubise and Pomegranate Molasses.  2. Velouté – This is a white sauce similar to béchamel, but with chicken stock instead of milk. Baked Chicken Thighs with Velouté.  3. Espagnole – This is a brown sauce based from a brown stock reduction, thickened with a brown roux. This takes longer to prepare, particularly with a demi-glace, which can take days to reduce to culinary gold. Smoked stuffed pork loin in Sauce Espagnole.  Sauce Diane - A daughter sauce that contains mushrooms and heavy cream. Steak Diane.  Sauce Chasseur – Contains fresh tomatoes. Chicken Chasseur.  Sauce Bordelaise - This adds an entire bottle of Bordeaux, some Brandy, and raw bone marrow. Steak with Bordelaise.  Sauce Bourgiuignonne – Includes a heavy addition of reduced red wine. Beef Bourgignonne.  4. Tomate – This is a tomato-based sauce, with the addition of pork. It's saltier and more complex than bright and acidic modern tomato sauces. Halibut with Sauce Tomate.  5. Hollandaise – This is an emulsion of egg yolks and butter. It’s a slightly tricky sauce to make, in order to get it to emulsify (and to stay emulsified), but a split sauce can be corrected by slowly mixing the broken sauce into a little hot water and/or an additional egg yolk. Bearnaise is a daughter sauce with infused white wine vinegar, chirvel (sub parsley) and tarragon. NY Strips with Sauce Bearnaise.  |
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Mother Sauces: Where it Began Mother Sauces is Wrong Turns out that Escoffier did NOT add Hollandaise as the fifth sauce, he specified mayonnaise as the fifth mother sauce but the editors of the English translation of his book changed what he had written to make Hollandaise sauce the fifth mother sauce. |
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Originally Posted By engineer61: Mother Sauces: Where it Began Mother Sauces is Wrong Turns out that Escoffier did NOT add Hollandaise as the fifth sauce, he specified mayonnaise as the fifth mother sauce but the editors of the English translation of his book changed what he had written to make Hollandaise sauce the fifth mother sauce. I've stumbled upon this controversy myself. Like I mentioned, learning the history of French cuisine has been interesting in itself!  In either case, mayonnaise and hollandaise at their core are similar; the emulsification of egg yolks with oil vs. egg yolks with butter, and both building are building blocks to things like aioli vs. bearnaise. If there was a translation error, it seems perhaps mayonnaise was a "maybe" mother sauce, which may have been swapped out more definitively with hollandaise by the translators. The youtuber's research is compelling, but I'd love to see other deep dives.
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