SAVORY SAUCES.
The same traits are abundantly manifested in the making of sauces.
While Dumas attributed the culinary superiority of the French to their bouillon, George H. Ellwanger, who has written an entertaining book on "The Pleasures of the Table," declares that "the supreme triumph of the French cuisine consists in its sauces."
Many of the French gourmets and chefs have held the same view, and undoubtedly more inventive skill has been shown, and more reputations have been made, in the realm of sauces than in any other department of the art of cooking.
Recipes for eighty-one of the best French sauces are given in "L'Art du Bien Manger," and two hundred and forty-six sauces are described in Charles Ranhofer's "The Epicurean." Perhaps the number of possible sauces is not as large as that of the soups; yet there is ample scope still for inventive genius.
Not only men but cities have been made famous by a sauce. In the restaurants of Paris and all over Europe, in fact, Rouen duck is often on the bill of fare. But as Lieut.-Col. Newnham-Davis says in "The Gourmet's Guide to Europe," "the Rouen duck is not any particular breed of duck, though the good people of Rouen will probably stone you if you assert this. It is simply a roan duck. The rich sauce which forms part of the dish was, however, invented at Rouen."
It was with a duck sauce that one of the French restaurateurs of our time won fame and fortune. For a number of years every American and Englishman in Paris who could afford it, went to the Tour d'Argent to eat a duck as prepared by Frédéric Delair. He used two ducks for each order. One of them, well-cooked, was for the meat, while the other, quite rare (or under-done, as the English say) was put into a silver turnscrew and had all its juices—including that of the liver—squeezed out. These juices make a sauce which I have eaten with enjoyment and impunity; but I have been told by a physician at Lyons that some persons are made ill by it, owing, apparently, to some injurious quality in raw duck-livers.
The "Tour d'Argent" and Frédéric Delair
Most of the Paris restaurants, now that Frédéric is no more, have their silver turnscrew, and they do not feel guilty of plagiarism, for Frédéric did not really originate this trick but adapted it from the practice of French peasants who tried to get as much juice as possible out of their tough and skinny ducks by smashing the carcasses with stones.
Already in the middle ages the saucier, or saucemaker, was the headman in the cuisine of French aristocrats.
The age of Carême (who wrote eloquently and lovingly about sauces) was, as Ellwanger remarks, "the era of quintessences—of the cuisine classique, when chemistry contributed new resources, and fish, meats, and fowls were distilled, in order to add a heightened flavor to the sauces and viands that their etherealized essences were to accentuate. One thinks of Lucullus and Apicius, and of the 'exceeding odoriferous and aromatical vapor' of the ovens of the artist mentioned by Montaigne."
The most common ingredients used to make the savory and appetizing French sauces are the yolks of eggs (raw or cooked), salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, tomatoes, bouillon, shallots, anchovies, onions, garlic, carrots, olive oil, orange rind, truffles, cream, mushrooms, pickles, wines, meat extracts, cayenne, and diverse aromatic herbs. But the most important of all French sauces is melted French butter—not "kitchen butter," but the fresh, fragrant product of the creamery. With such butter, and plenty of it, gastronomic miracles can be performed.
CARÊME
There is a great deal of local Flavor in French sauces. Blindfold a Parisian gourmet who knows his country, and place before him dishes made after the fashions of different provinces, and he will tell you at once the name of the town they smack of.
The coast towns enjoy special advantages in this respect, as they can use diverse shellfish and other marine creatures peculiar to their region to impart special overtones of flavor, so to speak, to their sauces.
French enthusiasm over sauces reached its climax in the exclamation that with sauce Robert a man might be pardoned for eating his own grandfather!
Brillat-Savarin, like many of his countrymen, went too far when he declared that "poultry is for cookery what canvas is to the painter."
No doubt, many of the sauces served with poultry in French restaurants (each of which has its specialty, as it has in the line of fish sauces) are delicious, yet good chickens, ducks, and turkeys, not to speak of game birds, have flavors of their own which it is a barbarism to disguise even with the noblest of sauces—except once in a while, for the sake of variety. The way to cook any winged creature if you want the most delicious flavor it can yield, is roasting à la broche.