Saucy Mothers

One must not forget, in fact, that it is through the subtlety by which our sauces are constructed that the French cuisine enjoys such a world-wide supremacy

They're not a modest bunch, French chefs, are they? That quotation is from perhaps the most famous of the lot, Auguste Escoffier. It appears in his seminal work, Ma Cuisine. Rereading it, I became a little confused. If, for example you consult culinary works of genius such as A Bunch of Fives (© T Johnston, 2015) you will read that Escoffier listed five "mother sauces". But the man himself says there are three, velouté, Béchamel and tomato. Except he then adds espagnole, and 20 pages later he tells us that mayonnaise is indeed a mother sauce. He was better at cooking than at writing.

Now your eyes may well be glazing over at this point. What brought it to mind was writing last week about the Austrians claiming wiener schnitzel as their own when it in fact originates from Milan. So let's examine the French supremacy a little more closely. Exhibit A, Béchamel sauce. The French will point to Louis de Béchameil, Marquis of Nointel, hence the name. Now I have a sneaky feeling that the good Louis, despite ending up as head steward to King Louis XIV, spent very little time in the kitchen. Indeed, I suspect he didn't know his roux from his elbow. But what he clearly had was a very sycophantic chef who decided to name the sauce after the boss.

It prompted a fellow aristocrat, the Duke of Escars, to comment, That fellow Béchameil has all the luck! I was serving breast of chicken à la crème more than 20 years before he was born, but I have never had the chance of giving my name to even the most modest sauce.  And Béchameil's chef almost certainly didn't invent it. One of the earliest of the great recipe books, Le Cuisinier François  by François de la Varenne in 1651 contains an early version of the sauce.

And your point, Mr Johnston? La Varenne was clearly French. Ah, but let's go to 16th century Florence where Italian chefs were producing a sauce made with milk thickened with breadcrumbs or flour. When Catherine de Medici married the French king Henry II, she was so horrified at the notion of having to eat French food that she took her own chefs and their sauce balsamella. And as velouté is really just a variation on Béchamel, the liquid being stock instead of milk, can we give the credit for that to the Italians as well? The jury must be out.

Let's turn our attention to tomato sauce. French? Well, consider that the tomato came to Europe only in the 16th century, brought by Spanish explorers. At the outset, tomatoes were widely suspected of being poisonous (as were potatoes) and took a while to catch on. The earliest record of tomato sauce is from 1694 entitled Lo Scalco alla Moderna - by a chef from Naples.

Mayonnaise? More controversy. The name seems to come from Mahon, a port in Menorca. The sauce, they say, was made to celebrate a French defeat of the British. I see. In a tiny ship's galley, you suddenly decide to try out one of the more fiddly sauces which, of course, requires fresh eggs. Whereas the Spanish have been making alioli for centuries with garlic, oil and sometimes with egg yolk. Maybe, just maybe, that too was pinched.

Auguste Escoffier

And finally, Sauce espagnole. No one really knows why it got the name Spanish, but it cannot be doubted that this was a French creation. So, M. Escoffier, the nationality of your five mothers which establish French supremacy? One out of five ain't bad.

And before any French or Francophile chums write in, I actually do believe that French cuisine is the best in the world, and I care not one jot about cultural appropriation when it comes to food; however, it's always fun to examine culinary claims