Sauce

A sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi-solid food used in preparing other dishes or served alongside them. They are rarely eaten alone; 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 doubanjiang, a Chinese soy bean paste, is mentioned in the *Rites of Zhou*.

All sauces require a liquid component. They are a fundamental part of cuisines worldwide, used for both sweet and savory dishes. Sauces can be prepared and served in various ways: cold (like mayonnaise), prepared cold but served lukewarm (like pesto), cooked and served warm (like béchamel), or cooked and served cold (like apple sauce). While many sauces are freshly made by cooks, especially in restaurants, many are now sold premade and packaged, such as Worcestershire sauce, HP Sauce, soy sauce, or ketchup. Salad dressings are sauces for salads, and in Pakistani and Indian cuisine, sauces are used to make 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 providing complementary or contrasting flavors. Other cultures use similar accompaniments for the same purpose, such as relishes or stews like the Ethiopian *wat* served with injera flatbread. Composing a sauce and serving it with a dish is mainly a Western, particularly French, concept. In Western cooking, except for pasta, sauces usually accompany meats and other proteins that have been simply cooked, such as fried items. 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 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 this way is called an integral sauce. Several basic cooked preparations, such as stocks, demi-glace, and espagnole sauce, may be preprepared and included in cooked sauces; these often aim to resemble 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 flavors, but they also create contrasting elements: a tart lemon sauce often pairs with sweet white chocolate mousse, smooth sauces provide textual contrast with crunchy pastry, and in hot fudge sundaes, a warm sauce contrasts with chilled ice cream.

**Cuisines**

**American** Popular sauces in America include cold condiments like ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, tartar sauce, cocktail sauce, various hot sauces, and many salad dressings, often used for dishes other than salad. Barbecue sauce serves as both a condiment and an ingredient in some barbecue styles. 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, and hard sauce (which is not liquid).

**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 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, strong English mustard, and Worcestershire sauce are also used. Custard is a popular dessert sauce. Other sauces include Marie Rose sauce (for prawn cocktail), whisky sauce (for haggis), Albert sauce (horseradish sauce for braised beef), and cheddar sauce (for cauliflower or macaroni and cheese). In contemporary British cuisine, due to the country’s diversity, many sauces are of British origin but based on cuisines from 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 is a traditional Circassian sauce made from meat broth with pounded garlic, pepper, and sour milk or cream. Tkemali is a tart, savory 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.