What Is a Mother Sauce? Five Bases and Everything Built On Them

The system was set out by Antonin Careme in the early nineteenth century with four bases and revised by Auguste Escoffier around 1900 into the five now taught. Bechamel is milk thickened with a white flour and butter mixture. Veloute is a white stock, generally chicken, veal or fish, thickened with a pale flour and butter mixture. Espagnole is a brown stock thickened with a browned flour mixture and enriched with tomato and browned vegetables. Tomato sauce is built from tomatoes with aromatics and was traditionally thickened with roux and stock. Hollandaise is an emulsion of egg yolk and butter with acid, which is the odd one out since it contains no flour and no stock and is stabilised by an emulsifier rather than by starch. Each base is intended to be made in quantity, stored, and then divided and finished into specific sauces to order, which is the operational point.

Each base generates a family of named sauces by defined additions, and the naming is a vocabulary rather than a set of recipes:

• •Bechamel plus cheese becomes mornay, plus cream becomes cream sauce, plus onion becomes soubise
• •Veloute plus cream and egg yolk becomes allemande, plus mushrooms and white wine becomes a white wine sauce for fish
• •Espagnole reduced with stock becomes demi-glace, which then supports a large family including bordelaise with red wine and marrow, chasseur with mushrooms and shallots, and many others
• •Hollandaise plus tarragon and shallot reduction becomes bearnaise, plus orange becomes maltaise, plus whipped cream becomes mousseline
• •Tomato sauce supports its own derivatives and sits somewhat apart from the others in the classical scheme
• •The names matter professionally, since a brigade can be instructed in two words and will produce the same result, which is exactly what the system exists for

The system solved an organisational problem in large professional kitchens serving a long menu. Making every sauce from scratch to order is impossible within service times, and making every sauce separately in advance requires an unmanageable number of preparations. Producing a small number of bases in bulk and finishing them individually reduces both the preparation and the vocabulary required, and it allows work to be divided among a brigade with each station responsible for known components. Escoffier's wider reorganisation of the professional kitchen into stations, with a defined hierarchy and defined responsibilities, is the same logic applied to labour, and it replaced a chaotic system with one that could deliver a complex menu reliably. The codification also served as training, since a cook who knew the bases and the derivations could work in any kitchen using the same vocabulary, which made the profession portable across countries in a way it had not been.

The framework has been criticised and substantially displaced without disappearing. Flour-thickened sauces went out of fashion from the 1970s as reduction-based and emulsion-based sauces were favoured for being lighter and more intensely flavoured, and modern restaurant practice relies heavily on reduced stock, on butter emulsions, on vegetable purees and on techniques that produce body without starch. The framework's Eurocentrism has been criticised increasingly, since it presents one national tradition's organisation as the structure of cooking itself, and cuisines organised around quite different base preparations, including the sauce foundations of Chinese, Indian, West African and Mexican cooking, are not accommodated by it at all. Several writers have proposed expanded schemes. What survives and is genuinely useful is the underlying idea rather than the specific five, which is that cooking becomes manageable when a small number of well-made foundations support many finished dishes, and that idea is visible in every well-run kitchen regardless of tradition.

Five bases, four thickened with flour and one an emulsion, are made in bulk and then divided and finished into named derivatives to order, which solves the problem of serving a long menu within service times. The naming is a working vocabulary that lets a kitchen be instructed in two words. Reduction and emulsion largely displaced flour thickening from the 1970s, and the framework presents one national tradition as universal.