Sauces Reconsidered
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SAUCES RECONSIDERED Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy General Editor: Ken Albala, Professor of History, University of the Pacific ([email protected]) Rowman & Littlefield Executive Editor: Suzanne Staszak-Silva ([email protected]) Food studies is a vibrant and thriving field encompassing not only cooking and eating habits but also issues such as health, sustainability, food safety, and animal rights. Scholars in disciplines as diverse as history, anthropol- ogy, sociology, literature, and the arts focus on food. The mission of Row- man & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy is to publish the best in food scholarship, harnessing the energy, ideas, and creativity of a wide array of food writers today. This broad line of food-related titles will range from food history, interdisciplinary food studies monographs, general inter- est series, and popular trade titles to textbooks for students and budding chefs, scholarly cookbooks, and reference works. Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nine- teenth Century, by Erica J. Peters Three World Cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Chinese, by Ken Albala Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet, by Signe Rousseau Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America, by Mark McWilliams Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America, by Bruce Kraig and Patty Carroll A Year in Food and Beer: Recipes and Beer Pairings for Every Season, by Emily Baime and Darin Michaels Celebraciones Mexicanas: History, Traditions, and Recipes, by Andrea Law- son Gray and Adriana Almazán Lahl The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community, by Kimberly Wilmot Voss Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the Return of Artisanal Foods, by Suzanne Cope Food History Almanac: Over 1,300 Years of World Culinary History, Cul- ture, and Social Influence, by Janet Clarkson Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy: From Kitchen to Table, by Kath- erine A. McIver Eating Together: Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore, by Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo Nazi Hunger Politics: A History of Food in the Third Reich, by Gesine Gerhard The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, by Joel S. Denker Food in the Gilded Age: What Ordinary Americans Ate, by Robert Dirks Urban Foodways and Communication: Ethnographic Studies in Intangible Cultural Food Heritages Around the World, by Casey Man Kong Lum and Marc de Ferrière le Vayer Food, Health, and Culture in Latino Los Angeles, by Sarah Portnoy Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine Influence Diet, by Kima Cargill Prison Food in America, by Erika Camplin K’Oben: 3,000 Years of the Maya Hearth, by Amber M. O’Connor and Eugene N. Anderson As Long As We Both Shall Eat: A History of Wedding Food and Feasts, by Claire Stewart American Home Cooking: A Popular History, by Tim Miller A Taste of Broadway: Food in Musical Theater, by Jennifer Packard Pigs, Pork, and Heartland Hogs: From Wild Boar to Baconfest, by Cynthia Clampitt Sauces Reconsidered: Après Escoffier, by Gary Allen SAUCES RECONSIDERED Après Escoffier Gary Allen ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allen, Gary (Gary J.), author. Title: Sauces reconsidered : après Escoffier / Gary Allen. Description: Lanham, Maryland : the Rowman & Littlefield, [2019] | Series: Rowman & Littlefield studies in food and gastronomy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018029461 (print) | LCCN 2018032723 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538115145 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538115138 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sauces. | Sauces—History. | Escoffier, A. (Auguste), 1846–1935. | LCGFT: Cookbooks. Classification: LCC TX819.A1 (ebook) | LCC TX819.A1 A37 2019 (print) | DDC 641.81/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029461 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America For my wife, Karen Philipp, who is saucy in a good way. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi INTRODUCTION 1 A FEW WORDS ABOUT SALT 3 PART I: ANCIENS REGIMES 1 SO MANY RICH SAUCES 7 2 OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 15 3 NINETEENTH CENTURY 25 4 THE FRENCH WERE NOT, OF COURSE, 4 THE ONLY SAUCIERS 39 5 THE MODERN WORLD OF COOKING BEGINS 51 PART II: O BRAVE NEW WORLD, THAT HAS SUCH SAUCES IN IT! 6 TIME FOR A CHANGE 61 7 SOLUTIONS 65 8 SUSPENSIONS 85 9 GELS 115 ix CONTENTS 10 EMULSIONS 127 11 CULTURED SAUCES 139 12 COMPOSITES 147 AFTERWORD 169 NOTES 171 REFERENCES 183 INDEX 189 x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS t would be unthinkable not to thank Harold McGee for doing so much Ito make the science of the kitchen accessible to cooks. More than anyone else, he stripped away the untested assumptions and accepted “facts” about what we do when we cook—and replaced them with methods that actually work (and explained why they work). Nor can I omit my friend Robert DelGrosso, since this book grew directly from conversations we shared when we both worked at the Hyde Park cam- pus of The Culinary Institute of America (The CIA). Bob is one of those rare individuals who combines scientific outlook and artistic ability with a broad knowledge of the humanities—and manages to bring all that experi- ence into the kitchen. Speaking of The CIA, the Conrad N. Hilton Library and its wonderful staff have been generous (and patient) with their time and knowledge. I’ve availed myself of their largesse many times, for most of my books and several of my articles, and I’m immensely appreciative. Ken Albala—my editor, collaborator, and friend—had faith in this proj- ect when it was little more than an idea. He and the rest of the production staff at Rowman & Littlefield, especially Suzanne Staszak-Silva and Patricia Stevenson, have literally made this book what it is. That said, it is only fair to admit that any errors, egregious blunders, and unforgivable oversights encountered herein are entirely my own contributions. xi INTRODUCTION hat is a sauce? Everyone knows the answer, right? It’s that fluid sub- Wstance we pour over our food to make it taste better. Naturally, the real answer is a bit more complicated (or this book could be reduced to just those last fourteen words) and poses some interesting questions. For example, some of those “fluid substances” are by-products of the cooking process that serve to reinforce the flavor of the main ingredient (jus and pan gravy are familiar examples), while others are made separately and provide a culinary counterpoint to the primary ingredient. The latter in- clude, among others, the “marinara” that coats a pizza, the hollandaise atop eggs Benedict, and a vast array of condiments, either freshly prepared or commercially made—from mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise to Worces- tershire and sriracha. Then there is the question of viscosity. How much viscosity is too much? When does a sauce cease to be a sauce and become better described as a paste? And what if an ingredient, like Chinese sesame paste—which is more solid than Middle Eastern tahini—is thinned with other, more liquid ingre- dients to make something that is clearly sauce-like? Does that make it a kind of proto sauce? Still more issues add complexity to the discussion: How does the in- tended usage of one of these flavorful liquids affect its position in a hierarchy of sauces? Where do we even place the sauce relative to other foodstuffs? Do we pool it under, pour it over, mix it thoroughly throughout, serve it on the side (in condiment bottles or little bowls of dipping liquid), or even 1 INTRODUCTION encapsulate it inside (like the agar-covered pearls of molecular gastronomy or Shanghai-style soup dumplings)? So, we’ve already begun to probe the variables that delineate possible cat- egories for sauces—the rude beginnings of a kind of taxonomy. Many of our decisions will place individual sauces somewhere on a continuous spectrum of sauces, rarely all one form or another. Attempting to force an ingredient into one of two categories (sauce or nonsauce) is almost as useless as separat- ing the entire animal kingdom into male and female. While that does provide one kind of distinction, it tells us very little about individual species and how they relate to one another. Nature, including the nature of sauces, is not so easily crammed into one cubbyhole or another. Needless to say, we are not the first to have tried to make sense of the world of sauces—some have had more success than others. There is noth- ing completely new under the sun. This book attempts to build on previ- ous efforts and, possibly, to create a more universal taxonomy of sauces. If, like Isaac Newton, we are to see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants—a notion he borrowed from a series of giants that goes all the way back to the Roman poet Lucan—then we must begin with the sauces and the sauce classifications of the past. It remains to be seen whether—after visiting Westminster Abbey and literally standing on the shoulders (and the rest of what remains) of Isaac Newton—our view has been much en- hanced by the experience.