The Gentle Art of Sauce Making

Religious scholars agree that in Heaven, the English provide the entertainment, the Germans do the work and the French get on with the cooking. If you’re unlucky enough to end up in Hell, you’ll find the English at the stoves, the Germans on stage and the French on strike.

In other words – if there’s something that is heavenly about French culture, it’s their cuisine.

And there’s a crucial characteristic of French cooking that makes it not necessarily better than Italian, Indian, Chinese, or most others, but different. And that’s making sauce.
Other cuisines end up with liquors and juices and gravies - usually it’s what’s left in the pot - but the French set about making an accompanying sauce that often never meets the main ingredient until they share a plate, just because it’s worth the effort.

Once you've been promoted to a “Saucier” in a professional kitchen, you can take a little pride – you’ve proved yourself capable of making the most elegant item in your job description, under extreme pressure, which item your customers value at a level known as “good money”. You cannot really learn the art of sauce making without doing it a lot, which is what chefs do, so why not get saucing whenever you feel the urge.

For example – if you bake a fat piece of white fish, make a beurre blanc and flavor with a little dill. If you roast a duck, rustle-up a sour cream, brandy and green peppercorn number. If you’re roasting a rib of beef, knock-up a béarnaise sauce as well as the gravy. If you’re grilling some lamb chops, put on the table a jug of wild garlic, white wine and rosemary (pardon my French) jus.

You’ll quickly start getting them just right, just the right consistency, the right balance of acid, the right amount of alcohol, seasoning and so on. There’s some rules, you can add a little technique and you need to take care of the important bits but frankly – it’s easy to master a few killer sauces.

There’s only about three different types of sauce anyway, and at the top of this short list, ordered by the ratio of tastiness to difficulty is the range of sauces made by reduction.

Like the body in Blowup, there would always be an object essential to the plot, lurking in the background, were you to take a photograph in any decent working kitchen. This object is the stockpot, and without one or two of these bubbling away on the back of the range these kitchens wouldn’t be able to produce anything worthwhile in the “Sauces made by Reduction” category.

To me at home, it used to seem quite a hassle having to put on stocks, get together the right bits and bobs to share the pot, but if you take a sensibly careless approach it really is worth the very little bother.

So what to do.

Any meat bones, resulting from pre-cooking butchery, or any remnants of the cooked joint or carcass, should be thrown in a pot rather than the bin. Then fill it up with water and simmer away for a few hours. You’ve only got to avoid two mistakes and you’ve got a decent stock and only one measly pot for the designated dishwasher (or Kitchen Porter, as I like to say chez moi) to deal with.
Quite often the chicken or duck carcass will have a few vegetables and herbs stuffed in its cavity but if not and you’ve got an onion, carrot, some leeks or celery knocking around and you can be bothered you can throw them in as well. Likewise some fresh thyme or bay.

Mistake number one is being too vigorous in the boiling. If it’s churning around too much the fat in the pot will be emulsified with the liquor and you’re up that famous creek. If you avoid mistake one you’ll probably avoid mistake two, which is reducing the contents of the pot to a cinder.

Barring these forseen circumstances you can leave the pot on for a couple of hours, strain and then reduce as much as you like to end up with a concentrated, gelatinous pool of meaty flavor. Put it in the fridge. When it’s cold you can take off the fat which will appear on the top, then freeze or keep airtight in the fridge for five days or so.
These meat stocks usually end up mixing with alcohol, are reduced further, get joined by various aromatics and finished off with knobs of butter or cream or egg yolks or whatever.

For fish stocks, as for girls, it’s different.
If you’re poaching the fish you end up with a liquor anyway, and it’s usually tuned into a sauce on the spot. If you’re making a bespoke stock, there’s one mistake in the choosing of the bones and another in the boiling.

So, first – not any old bones will do. Use only uber-fresh, non-oily, white fish bones like cod, plaice, monkfish, haddock etc. Even Mediterranean, slightly oily types like seabass seem, to me, too strong, though there’s no harm in these characters appearing in stews.
The idea is the same; wash the bones, top with water, throw in any or none of the following aromatics – onion, carrot, leek, celery, fennel, mushrooms, peppercorns, thyme, bay, parsley.

Then there’s the boiling mistake – don’t leave it on the stove for longer than half an hour. That’s it.
Bring it to the boil, scoop off any white scum that forms, turn down the heat and simmer for around twenty to thirty minutes. Let it cool then strain. You mustn’t over boil and reduce (so what water you put on top of the bones is the volume of stock which results). If you leave it on too long the bones will impart a rather “waiting-for-the-bus-outside-the-fishmonger-at-5-O’Clock” flavour to the liquor. If you avoid the error, it’s a bit more “opening-the-window-of-your-room-to-the-sea-air-on-a-sunny-English-morning”.

A good fish stock will end up in a fish soup or stew, in a Champagne and cream sauce or in a mushroom veloute for a sole Bonne Femme.

Get these stocks down pat, turn them into beautiful sauces, and you’re really cooking.