sauces fall into various categories. What might be called ‘composed sauces’, i.e. composed in the kitchen and served with a dish, are essential to classical French cuisine and, more generally, are important in adding palatability to numerous dishes throughout the western world. But these sauces have few counterparts in the rest of the world; thus in Asia it is more usual to find that what fills the role of a sauce is part of the dish itself (e.g. curries), or that it is a condiment such as the SE Asian fish sauces.
