The first sauce may have been chilli mashed into water 9,000 years ago
Chilli peppers mashed into water may count as one of humanity's first sauces, credited to the Aztecs around 7000 BCE. Rome had fermented fish garum, China had jiang pastes, and France later turned sauce-making into a specialist kitchen job with its own title: the saucier.
A sauce is any liquid, creamy or semi-solid preparation served on food or used to cook it, rarely eaten alone. Its job is to add flavour, texture and looks, either by deepening what is already in the dish or by supplying a contrast. The word is French, probably from the late Latin salsa and ultimately from salsus, meaning salted. Sauces may be served cold like mayonnaise, cooked and kept warm like béchamel, or cooked and then chilled like apple sauce.
Ancient examples show up across the world. Chinese jiang, fermented pastes of meat, fish, grain or beans, are documented in the third century BCE, and doubanjiang appears in the Rites of Zhou. Garum, a salted ferment of anchovies or sardines with roots in ancient Greece, may be the oldest recorded sauce in Europe.
Making a sauce separately and pairing it with a dish is largely a Western, and especially French, habit. Western sauces, pasta aside, usually accompany simply cooked proteins, while Asian cooking tends to build sauce into the dish itself, as in curry, or to use it as a condiment, like fish sauce. Classical French composed sauces range from uncooked blends such as pesto to cooked emulsions like Hollandaise; an integral sauce uses the juices a steak releases while it cooks. Cantonese cooks often thicken dishes with a slurry of cornstarch or potato starch.
Sweet sauces work through contrast: tart lemon against white chocolate mousse, or warm fudge poured over cold ice cream. Britain offers a whole map of pairings, with mint sauce for lamb, horseradish for beef and whisky sauce with haggis, plus bread sauce, the last survivor of the medieval bread-thickened sauces. Further east, Georgian tkemali is made from tart cherry plums, and Filipino tables carry banana ketchup.
Source: Sauce
