The sauce is a cooking or pastry preparation, made up of a binder
and from a flavor and/or from aromas and/or spices, with a pasty, creamy
or semi-liquid consistency. The purpose of the sauce is to bind different
foods together and give them a consistency more compact and uniform to accompany
meat, fish, pasta, vegetables and give flavour, seasoning, enhance the organoleptic
characteristics of the food.

History

Horse mackerel in escabeche «The sauces are an abstract idea of composite flavors that has come
to life by the hand of Pygmalion cooks. (Livio Cerini from Castegnate.) Livio Cerini from
Castegnate writes that the idea of salsa must have been born when prehistoric man accidentally
brought to lips a finger dipped in "that something" that dripped from a lamb on a spit
and having it he found it pleasant he thought of collecting "that something" and pouring it
on the snails cooked in the ash.
We find sauce recipes in the ancient cultures of the Sumerians, Egyptians,
Chaldeans, Dorians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans.
Salt was always very important in the rites of the Israelite people.
In the Bible it is written: «Whatever you offer as a sacrifice you will season it with salt,
and you shall not separate from your sacrifice the salt of the covenant of your God. In all your
oblations you will offer salt" (Leviticus, II, 13).
The Romans mixed salt with herbs and spices such as thyme, cumin,
ginger, pepper, apio, dill, crocus, spikenard which they used in the kitchen. They mixed salt
with the fish to make garum, the best-known condiment in antiquity, similar to the Colatura
of Cetara anchovies and oriental fish sauce.
Apicius in his treatise on gastronomy, De re coquinaria, On the culinary art,
from the 1st century AD, describes many sauces he invented, including the Apici bait,
from which the modern scapece derives spread all over the world.
Sauces became popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
In 1705 we find in the book Le cuisinier roial et bourgeois by Francois Massialot,
women described 15 sauce recipes, many of which have been handed down from
the 19th century to the present day.
In 1800 in Europe there was the apotheosis of tasting increasingly sophisticated sauces.
In 1934, Auguste Escoffier contemplated no less than 97 sauce recipes
In 1964, Julia Child offers us the most complete treatment of sauces
Starting from 2003, despite the lengthy preparation of funds, Alain Ducasse,
in his Grand livre de cuisine, describes no less than 66 sauce recipes,
which he uses on a daily basis. (source Wikipedia)


(selection 2023)