Surely, among all the food Flavors, nothing is more delicious than the natural savor of fresh sole or salmon, or a juicy steak or chop just off the grill. To put any kind of sauce—be it the best in the world—on such a dish is as unpardonable as it would be to pour cologne over a bunch of fragrant violets.
It is when the fish is a trifle "tired," or the meat without much flavor of its own, as so often happens, that these commercial sauces come to the rescue. Used only on such occasions, they have their value; and they are also desirable because of the variety they supply in the combination of flavors.
The French make hardly any use of bottled sauces; theirs are domestic, made in their own kitchens, and they attach more importance to them than to anything else in culinary art.
"Sauces, by the care and labor they require, by the costly sacrifices which they necessarily involve, ought to be considered as the essential basis of good cookery," according to Dubois-Bernard. "A man is never a good cook," he adds, "if he does not possess a perfect knowledge of sauces, and if he has not made a special study of the methodical principles on which their perfection depends."
The sauces provided in Parisian restaurants and private houses are certainly delicious; yet the French often err—and that is almost their only serious gastronomic fault—in sacrificing to them the delicious natural Flavors of diverse prime meats, just as Americans and Englishmen do by pouring on their bottled sauces.
Butter has among its many virtues that of developing the natural Flavors of meats and vegetables and may therefore often be used as a sauce in plain cooking à l'Anglaise. But, except for occasional variety, other sauces should be allowed to assert themselves over the natural food flavors only when these are not of the best.
COOK BOOKS.
Theodore Child—an American gastronomic missionary who unfortunately died young while traveling in Persia—remarks in his book, Delicate Feasting, that while there are hundreds of cook books, many of them admirable in their way, and bought by many, few are read or used, for the reason that most of them consist of a vast number of recipes, and "a cook must be already very learned in his art in order to know how to use them with advantage."
In other words, these books fail to explain the principles of the art of cooking—the ways of preserving, developing, and combining Flavors—as I have attempted to do in this chapter.
There are exceptions, and the best of these, so far as I know, is Mary Ronald's Century Cook Book in which various methods of cooking are explained lucidly, so that those who boil, fry, broil, and so on, not only may know what to do but why to do it thus and not otherwise. The different sections, on meats, fish, vegetables, entrées, breads, desserts, etc., all have prefatory pages of most useful condensed information.