Wayne Gisslen

Small Sauces

Appears in
Professional Cooking: 10th Edition
Professional Cooking

By Wayne Gisslen

Published 2025

  • About

The major leading sauces—béchamel; veal, chicken, and fish veloutés; and espagnole—are rarely used by themselves as sauces. They are more important as the bases for other sauces, called small sauces. Tomato sauce and hollandaise are used as they are, but they, too, are important as bases for small sauces.

Let’s expand our sauce family chart one more generation to include examples of the small sauces in order to show the relationships (Chart 9.2).
Chart 9.2 is probably a little more complicated than you might expect because of the extra arrows and the extra category of secondary leading sauces. These are relatively easy to explain.