Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>French culinary authorities have always considered sauces to be the basis of their cuisine’s distinctiveness. This can be seen in the cookbooks by Antonin Carême and Auguste Escoffier, the masters of classic French cuisine. French cuisine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries asserted itself as a reform of the over-complicated sauces of the Middle Ages. Several such waves of gastronomic revolution, including the “nouvelle cuisine” of the 1970s, tried to simplify sauces in the name of authentic flavor and notions of purity. Such movements were temporarily successful, but certain attributes of intensity, richness, and elaboration have tended to creep back. Over the past forty years, the eclipse of French gastronomy, or at least of France’s ability to define globally high-end cuisine, has been reflected in shifts away from the classic sauce repertoire.</jats:p>