In cooking, a sauce is a liquid, cream, or semi-solid food, served on or cajun cream sauce for fish in preparing other foods. Sauces are an essential element in cuisines all over the world. Sauces may be used for sweet or savory dishes. They may be prepared and served cold, like mayonnaise, prepared cold but served lukewarm like pesto, cooked and served warm like bechamel or cooked and served cold like apple sauce.
A chef who specializes in making sauces is called a saucier. In traditional British cuisine, gravy is a sauce used on roast dinner. The sole survivor of the medieval bread-thickened sauces, bread sauce is one of the oldest sauces in British cooking. Ajika is a spicy hot sauce originating in Abkhazia, widely used in Georgian cuisine and found also in parts of Russia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. Circassian cuisine, made on a base of meat broth with pounded garlic, pepper, and sour milk or cream.
In some Chinese cuisines, such as Cantonese, dishes are often thickened with a slurry of cornstarch or potato starch and water. Sauces in French cuisine date back to the Middle Ages. There were many hundreds of sauces in the culinary repertoire. In the early 19th century, the chef Marie-Antoine Carême created an extensive list of sauces, many of which were original recipes.
It is unknown how many sauces Carême is responsible for, but it is estimated to be in the hundreds. Carême considered the four grandes sauces to be Espagnole, Velouté, Allemande, and Béchamel, from which a large variety of petites sauces could be composed. In the early 20th century, the chef Auguste Escoffier refined Carême’s list of basic sauces in his classic Le Guide culinaire, which in the most recent 4th edition that was published in 1921, listed the foundation or basic sauces as Espagnole, Velouté, Béchamel, and Tomate. Sauce Velouté, a light stock-based sauce, thickened with a roux or a liaison, a mixture of egg yolks and cream. Sauce Béchamel, a milk-based sauce, thickened with a roux of flour and butter.