Vol. XXII · Stocks, Soups and Sauces Plate 5 of 11mother sauces, béchamel, velouté, espagnole, sauce tomate, hollandaise, Escoffier, roux, daughter sauces, mornay, demi-glace, French sauces, white sauce, 白酱MT

The Mother Sauces.

Learn five sauces and you can make a hundred: add cheese to béchamel and it is Mornay; add tarragon reduction to hollandaise and it is béarnaise.

In the early twentieth century Auguste Escoffier codified French sauces into five "mother sauces", each defined by its liquid and its thickener: béchamel, milk thickened with a white roux; velouté, a white stock (veal, chicken or fish) thickened with a blond roux; espagnole, brown stock thickened with a brown roux and enriched with tomato and mirepoix, reduced with more stock into demi-glace; sauce tomate, tomatoes cooked down with aromatics; and hollandaise, butter emulsified into egg yolks and lemon (X.5). From each, adding an ingredient makes a "daughter": Mornay (béchamel with cheese), suprême (velouté with cream), bordelaise (demi-glace with red wine and shallot), béarnaise (hollandaise with tarragon and shallot).

Three of the mothers are thickened with roux — flour cooked in fat (XXII.6) — and their consistency is set almost entirely by how much. Classic proportions per 250 mL of liquid: about 8 g each of flour and butter for a thin sauce or soup base, 16 g for a coating sauce, 24 g for a thick binding sauce (for croquettes, soufflé bases). The workshop thickens a béchamel.

Below: the thickness of a béchamel against grams of flour (in roux) per 250 mL of milk (the course starch-thickening index of VII.2), with the classic thin, coating and binding proportions, and the five mother sauces with a daughter of each.

What you will learn

Name the five mother sauces and their thickeners.
Make a daughter sauce from a mother.
Set a sauce's consistency by the roux.
Make béchamel without lumps.

Workshop

Thickness index from VII.2: (grams of wheat flour per 250 mL ÷ 15)², 1 being a sauce that coats a spoon. Classic proportions per 250 mL (1 cup): thin 1 tablespoon each of flour and butter (~8 g), medium 2 (~16 g), thick 3 (~24 g).

Five families, one proportion

On the course index, 8 g of flour per 250 mL gives 0.28 — thin; 16 g gives 1.14 — a sauce that coats a spoon; 24 g gives 2.56 — a thick binding sauce. Because thickness rises with the square of the starch, small changes matter: a sauce that is too thin needs only a little more roux, whisked in as a paste (beurre manié: flour kneaded with soft butter), and a sauce that is too thick is thinned with hot liquid.

Béchamel without lumps: melt 20 g butter, stir in 20 g flour and cook 2 minutes without colouring; take off the heat and whisk in 300 mL of milk — either cold milk into the hot roux or hot milk into a cooled roux, never hot into hot — then return to the heat and whisk until it boils and thickens; simmer gently 5–10 minutes to cook out the floury taste; season with salt, white pepper and nutmeg. The other roux sauces follow the same pattern with stock. Modern kitchens use the mothers less, preferring reductions and emulsions (XXII.7, XXXII.5), but the logic of mother and daughter is still how cooks extend a sauce.

At the stove

Make 300 mL of béchamel with 20 g each of flour and butter. Divide it: add grated cheese to one half for Mornay, and thin the other with hot stock into a soup base.

Antonin Carême had named four mother sauces in the early nineteenth century; Escoffier, a century later, dropped allemande (velouté with egg yolk) as a daughter, added tomato and hollandaise, and gave the system the shape taught in cookery schools ever since.

Terms

Mother sauce: One of five base sauces from which others are made.
Daughter sauce: A mother sauce with ingredients added.
Beurre manié: Flour kneaded with soft butter, whisked in to thicken.
Demi-glace: Espagnole reduced with more brown stock to a glossy sauce.

Five mothers: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomato, hollandaise; daughters add an ingredient. Roux sauces are set by the roux: about 8, 16 and 24 g of flour per 250 mL for thin, coating and thick.

Sources

A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.
H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.