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FOOD QUOTES SECTION

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Sauce Quotes

“I want to do my share, you know that, Archie, but I can't make good glace de viande if I have to be watching murderers.”
Fritz the chef in 'Kill Now-Pay Later' (1961) Rex Stout

"A well made sauce will make even an elephant or a grandfather palatable."
Grimod de la Reynière

“The difference between good and bad cookery can scarcely be more strikingly shown than in the manner in which sauces are prepared and served. If well made....they prove that both skill and taste have been exerted in its arrangements. When coarsely or carelessly prepared....they greatly discredit the cook.”
Eliza Acton
‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ (1845)

“SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
'The Devil's Dictionary' (1911)

"In England, there are sixty different religions and only one sauce."
Attributed to Voltaire (1694-1778)
Domenico Caracciolo, attributed (18th Century)

"England has three sauces and three hundred and sixty religions, whereas France has three religions and three hundred and sixty sauces."
Talleyrand

"Sauces comprise the honor and glory of French cookery. They have contributed to its superiority, or pre-eminence, which is disputed by none. Sauces are the orchestration and accompaniment of a fine meal, and enable a good chef or cook to demonstrate his talent."
Curnonsky

"In the orchestra of a great kitchen, the sauce chef is a soloist."
Fernand Point
"The assistant of the stock, the roux, brings to the brown sauce only a flavor note of little importance, beyond its thickening principle, and it has the disadvantage of requiring, in order that the sauce be perfect, an almost absolute elimination of its components. Only the starchy principle remains in a sauce properly skimmed. Indeed, if this element is absolutely necessary to give mellowness and velvetiness to the sauce; it is much simpler to give it pure, which permits one to bring it to the point in as little time as possible, and to avoid a too prolonged sojourn on the fire. It is therefore infinitely probable that before long starch, fecula, or arrowroot obtained in a state of absolute purity will replace flour in the roux."
Escoffier
 

"Doctor Johnson defined a sauce as something which is eaten with food, in order to improve its flavor. It would be difficult to believe that a man of the intelligence and culture of Dr. Johnson....had expressed himself in these terms, if we did not know that Dr. Johnson was English. Even today his compatriots, incapable of giving any flavor to their food, call on sauces to furnish to their dishes that which their dishes do not have. This explains the sauces, the jellies and prepared extracts, the bottled sauces, the chutneys, the ketchups which populate the tables of this unfortunate people."
Alberto Denti di Piranjo
‘Educated Gastronome’ (1950)

"Woe to the cook whose sauce has no sting."
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400?)

"It is the sauce that distinguishes a good chef. The Saucier is a soloist in the orchestra of a great kitchen."
Fernand Point

"A sauce.....adds something, really two things: a taste as well as the opportunity to think about how the thing was made. This is the same kind of pleasure we derive when we look at a painting; the eye is pleased, while the mind explores the esthetic windings of a technique and a willed structure."
Raymond Sokolov

"Hungry is a mighty fine sauce."
Southern folk saying