Vinaigrette and Other Sauces for Vegetables

Much of the genius behind French cooking rests in its sauces, which have the magical ability to transform the simplest foods into something far more tempting than they would be otherwise. Most of us restrict our use of vinaigrette to tossing with a green salad, but vinaigrette is also delicious with asparagus, artichokes, and best of all, leeks. While vinaigrette is best served with cold vegetables, hollandaise and its derivatives are best dolloped on vegetables that are hot. The most famous is sauce maltaise—hollandaise made with orange juice—on top of asparagus, but hollandaise and its relative sauce, mousseline, which is made by folding whipped cream with hollandaise, can go with artichokes, steamed green vegetables such as broccoli, and even root vegetables such as beets. Bagna caouda is made by dipping assorted vegetables into a hot sauce made with olive oil, garlic, anchovy paste, and, in my own version, a little heavy cream and truffle oil.