Finished with a twist

The culinary scholar recognizes five sauces: bechamel, veloute, espagnole, tomato and hollandaise. No more. All sauce, he insists, flows from one of these "mother sauces." A charmingly compact, if incomplete, worldview, ignoring, as it does, the chutneys and pestos and salsas of the world.

Leah Eskin

October 28, 2012