Sauces are liquids that accompany the primary ingredient in a dish. Their purpose is to enhance the flavor of that ingredient—a ortion of meat or fish or grain or vegetable—either by deepening and broadening its own intrinsic flavor, or by providing a contrast or compleemnt to it. While the meat or fish or grain or vegetable is always more or less itself, a sauce can be anything the cook wants it to be, and makes the dish a richer, more various, more satisfying composition. Sauces help the cook feed our perpetual hunger for stimulating sensations, for the pleasures of taste and smell, touch and sight. Sauces are distillations of desire.
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In addition to their heightened flavor, sauces give tactile pleasure by the way they move in the mouth. Cooks construct sauves to have a consistency somewhere between the resitsant solidity of animal or plant tissues and the elusive thinness of water. This is the consistency of luscious ripe fruit that melts in the mouth and seems to feed us willingly, and of the fats taht give a persistent, moist fullness to animal flesh and to cream and butter. The fluidity of a sauce allows it to coat the solid food evenly and lend it a pleasing moistness, while the substancial, lingering quality helps the sauce cling to the food and to our tongue and palate as well, prolonging the experience of its flavor and providing a sensation of richness.
