Sauce

A sauce is liquid or sometimes semi-solid food served on or used in preparing other foods. Sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavor, moisture, and visual appeal to another dish.

Quotes

• Thai eyt it with full gud will
  That soucht na nother sals thar-till
  Bot appetyt.
  • With full good will they all fell to,
    And sought no other sauce thereto
    Than appetite.
  • John Barbour,The Brus (14th c.), Book 3, line 539 (tr. Archibald A. H. Douglas, The Bruce, 1964).

• MAYONNAISE, n.: One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state religion.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• SAUCE, n.: The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• There are in England sixty different religions and only one sauce.
  • Francesco Caracciolo (1752–1799), attributed in Hugh Percy Jones, Dictionary of Foreign Phrases (1922).
  • Similar remarks are attributed to Voltaire (1694–1778) on various occasions.

• There's no sauce in the world like hunger.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part II (1615), Book 3, Ch. 5.

• Qu'a toz mangiers est sausse fains
  Bien destanpree et bien confite.
  • For hunger is a sauce, well blended and prepared, for any food.
  • Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion (ca. 1170), Line 2854.

• It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.
  • Alistair Cooke, Talk About America (1968), Ch. 2.

• Though blood be the best sauce for victory, yet must it not be more than the meat.
  • Thomas Fuller, The History of the Holy War (1639), Book I, Ch. 24.

• The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
  • Henry James, Theatricals: Second Series (1895).

• The only really good vegetable is Tabasco sauce. Put Tabasco sauce in everything. Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.
  • P. J. O'Rourke, The Bachelor Home Companion (1986).

• I tell you Folks, all Politics is Apple Sauce.
  • Will Rogers, The Illiterate Digest (1924), "Breaking into the Writing Game".

• Epicurean cooks sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (ca. 1606)), Act II, Scene i.

• Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it.
  • Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries (2005).

• The English have only one sauce, melted butter.
  • Voltaire, attributed as a remark to Adam Smith, in P. J. O'Rourke, On The Wealth of Nations (2007), p. 184.

• Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable.
  • E. B. White, The Elements of Style (1959), Ch. V: "An Approach to Style".

Proverbs

• Sauce for a Goose, is Sauce for a Gander.
  • 17th century proverb, as found in Sir Roger L'Estrange, Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists (1694), Fable 302: "A Husband and Wife twice Married". Compare Francis Kirkman, The English Rogue: Continued, in the Life of Meriton Latroon (1668): "What was sauce for a Goose was sauce for a Gander."