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.