Sauce

A sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi-solid food that is served on top of other dishes or used in their preparation. They are rarely eaten by themselves; instead, sauces contribute flavor, texture, and visual appeal. The word "sauce" comes from French, likely from the post-classical Latin *salsa*, which itself derives from the classical Latin *salsus*, meaning "salted." One of the oldest recorded European sauces is garum, a fish sauce used by the Ancient Romans, while the Chinese soy bean paste doubanjiang is mentioned in the *Rites of Zhou* 20. Every sauce requires a liquid component, and they are a fundamental part of cuisines worldwide.

Sauces can be sweet or savory. They may be prepared and served cold (like mayonnaise), prepared cold but served lukewarm (like pesto), cooked and served warm (like béchamel), or cooked and served cold (like applesauce). Many sauces are freshly made by a cook, particularly in restaurants, but today many are sold premade and packaged, such as Worcestershire sauce, HP Sauce, soy sauce, or ketchup. Salad sauces are called salad dressing. In Pakistani and Indian cuisine, sauces are made for curries. A chef who specializes in making sauces is called a saucier.

**Function** Sauces improve a dish's flavor by deepening existing tastes or by adding complementary or contrasting ones. Other cultures use similar accompaniments to the same effect, such as relishes and stews, like the Ethiopian *wat* served with injera flatbread. Cooking a sauce and then serving it with a dish—a composed sauce—is mainly a Western, especially French, concept. In Western cooking, aside from pasta, sauces usually accompany meats and other proteins that have been simply cooked, such as fried foods. In Asia, sauces are either integrated into the dish, as in curries, or used as a condiment, like fish sauce.

**History** The Latin *salsus* (salted) is the root of the word "sauce." One of the oldest sauces is thought to be hot sauce, created by the Aztecs around 7000 BCE by mixing chili peppers with water. Other early sauces include *jiang*, Chinese pastes made from fermented meat, fish, grains, or beans, documented in the 3rd century BCE; and garum, a mixture from ancient Greece made from fermented anchovies or sardines and salt.

**Composed Sauces** Composed sauces are made in the kitchen and are especially important in classical French cuisine. They can be uncooked mixtures, like pesto and skordalia, or cooked, like Hollandaise and white sauces. They always contain basic seasonings, and more intricate preparations include condiments and an intensified element of the ingredient they accompany (for example, a sauce for steak that incorporates meat juices released during cooking). A sauce made from this last method is called an integral sauce. Several basic cooked preparations, such as stocks, demi-glace, and espagnole sauce, may be pre-prepared and included in cooked sauces; these often aim to imitate a sauce made from an intensified element of the accompanied ingredient.

**Sweet Sauces** Sauces are served hot and cold in many desserts. Like savory sauces, sweet sauces intensify the flavors they accompany, but they also create contrasting elements: a tart lemon sauce is often paired with a sweet white chocolate mousse, smooth sauces provide textural contrast with crunchy pastry, and in hot fudge sundaes, a warm sauce contrasts with chilled ice cream.

**Cuisines**

*American* Popular American sauces include cold condiments like ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, tartar sauce, cocktail sauce, various hot (spicy) sauces, and a variety of salad dressings, often used for dishes other than salad. Barbecue sauce is used both as a condiment and as an ingredient in some types of barbecue. Hot sauces include gravy and tomato sauce, often served with pasta. White (béchamel) sauce is widely used as an ingredient. Dessert sauces include fudge sauce, butterscotch sauce, hard sauce (which is not liquid), and many others.

*British* In traditional British cuisine, gravy is a sauce used on roast dinner. Bread sauce, a survivor of medieval bread-thickened sauces, is one of the oldest in British cooking. Apple sauce, mint sauce, and horseradish sauce are used on meat (usually pork, lamb, and beef, respectively). Redcurrant jelly, mint jelly, and white sauce are also used. Salad cream is sometimes used on salads. Tomato ketchup and brown sauce are used on fast-food-type dishes. Mushroom ketchup and strong English mustard are also used on various foods, as is Worcestershire sauce. Custard is a popular dessert sauce. Other popular sauces include Marie Rose sauce (used in prawn cocktail), whisky sauce (for haggis), Albert sauce (horseradish sauce to enhance braised beef), and cheddar sauce (used in cauliflower or macaroni and cheese). In contemporary British cuisine, due to the diversity of society, many sauces are of British origin but based on the cuisines of other countries, particularly former colonies such as India.

*Caucasian* Ajika is a spicy hot sauce from Abkhazia, widely used in Georgian cuisine and also found in parts of Russia, Armenia, and Georgia. Ships (sauce) is a traditional Circassian sauce made from a meat broth base with pounded garlic, pepper, and sour milk or cream. Tkemali is a tart and savory traditional Georgian sauce made from cherry plums with spices including garlic, pennyroyal, coriander, dill, and chili.

*Chinese* China has many varied cuisines, but many compose dishes from sauces including different kinds of soy sauce, fermented bean paste (including doubanjiang), chili sauces, and oyster sauce.