Sauce

To cover or mix a food with a sauce. Sauce n. In the most basic terms, a sauce is a thickened, flavored liquid designed to accompany food in order to enhance and bring out its flavor. In the days before refrigeration, however, sauces were more often used to smother the taste of foods that had begun to go bad. The French are credited with refining the sophisticated art of sauce making. It was the 19th-century French chef Antonin Careme who evolved an intricate methodology by which hundreds of sauces were classified under one of five mother sauces. Those are: Espagnole (brown stock-based), Veloute' (light stock-based), Béchamel (basic white sauce), Hollandaise and Mayonnaise (Emulsified sauces) and Vinaigrette (oil-and-vinegar combinations).