Few among us know, though, that sauce was originally created to conceal ingredients of dubious freshness, or to conceal bad tastes. In the days before refrigeration, cooking ingredients spoiled easily; that’s why people like the Romans, who frequently held banquets used sauces.

When sauces were first created is uncertain, but it is presumed that the earliest empires’ chefs had already created different kinds of sauces. Banquets were frequently conducted to welcome visitors from other kingdoms, to felicitate soldiers after they won battles, or to mark other celebrations. Due to the frequency with which banquets were held, ingredients were stocked in kitchens, as hunting and harvesting were never easy. Often, some ingredients were almost rotten when they were used. Because of this, it was believed that sauces were created to mask the look and taste of those ingredients. But on the bright side, according to several writers, sauces were also used to show off the variety of costly herbs and spices available to the host. It was said that in early times, there was no Roman dish complete without a highly flavored and seasoned sauce, so thick and rich that no visitor could know what s/he was eating.

Ancient Romans used wheat flour or crumbled pastries to thicken their sauces, and honey, herbs, and spices to flavor them. A seasoning called ‘liquamen’ was most commonly used; it was made of fish stock and anchovies. Liquamen was so popular that it was produced commercially in several towns of the early Roman Empire.

For hundreds of years, several kinds of sauces were created, and some turned simple dishes into extravagant ones. But there are only 5 types which are considered to be the ‘mother sauces’. These are béchamel, veloute, espagnole, hollandaise, and mayonnaise. These sauces are called ‘mother sauces’ because they are very adaptable, and serve as the basis for a number of other sauces.

This sauce is more popularly known as ‘white sauce’, but it is also known as the king of all sauces because it is frequently used in many other dishes. Bechamel is composed of a smooth mixture of flour, milk, and butter. Milk was hardly used in sauces by the average family, who could only buy it from peddlers who sold watered-down or rancid milk (owing to the non-existence of refrigeration techniques). This is why only royalty had access to true white sauce.

There are four theories as to the origin of béchamel. One holds that when Catherine de Medici of Italy married King Henri II of France, her personal chefs followed her to France, introducing Italian cooking to the French court. Another story holds that béchamel was created by Duke Philippe de Mornay in the 1600s. He was also known to have been the creator of other mother sauces, like mornay, chasseur, lyonnaise, and porto. The third theory holds that béchamel was invented in the 17th century by a financier named Marquis Louis de Bechamel, who also became the chief steward of King Louis XIV. It is said that he created béchamel as he tried to come up with a different way to serve and eat dried food. The most popular story says that a chef of King Louis XIV named Francois Pierre de la Varenne invented the sauce. According to several authors, Varenne dedicated the sauce he invented to Bechamel, who was also working in the court of King Louis XIV.

According to some researchers, veloute is just an adaptation of bechamel sauce because it is a white type of sauce. However, veloute differs because it is a stock-based sauce that can be made of chicken, veal, or fish stock, and butter and flour is used to thicken this sauce.

Like the story of béchamel, sauce espagnole was the product of an inter-kingdom marriage. When Anne of Spain was married to Louis XIII of France, she brought her personal cooks to help in the preparation of their wedding feast. The Spanish cooks insisted on adding Spanish tomatoes to the rich brown sauce of France. The collaboration produced a very successful product which was named after its creators.

Making sauce espagnole begins with the preparation of a very dark brown roux (flour and fat mixture), then it is mixed with veal stock. The mixture is then added to several kilos of beef bones and meat, several pounds of vegetables, and seasoning. From this basic sauce one can produce other sauces like africane, bigarade, bourguignonne, chamignons, charcutiere, chasseur, chevreuil, and so on.

It was believed that sauce hollandaise was a variety of the earlier types of sauces brought by the Heugenots to France in the 17th Century. This sauce that was originally called sauce isigny uses butter and egg yolks as a binder. Hollandaise sauce is best served with vegetables, fish, and eggs.

Mayonnaise was invented due to the absence of cream when its creator was about to make a cream and egg sauce.

According to culinary writers, mayonnaise was created during a feast held to celebrate the French capture of a city in the Spanish isle of Minorca called Mahon in 1756. Duke Louis-Francois de Armand of Plessis de Richlieu’s personal chef thought of making a sauce out of cream and eggs, but when he went to the kitchen, he discovered that there was no cream available. The chef used olive oil instead and came up with a new kind of sauce.

There are several stories as to the origin of the word ‘mayonnaise’, but it is believed that mayonnaise was first called ‘mahonnaise’, derived from the name of the town Mahon. On the other hand, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the sauce owes its name to a typographical error in an 1841 cookbook. But according to Careme, the word ‘mayonnaise’ was derived from the word ‘magnonaise’, which means ‘made by hand’ or ‘stirred’.

Mayonnaise is an emulsion of eggs, oil, vinegar or lemon juice, and seasoning. This sauce is widely used as a spread and a dressing.