Sauces and Relishes

What I would like to say about sauces is that sometimes they are the greatest pleasure, and sometimes there is nothing more satisfying than to have in front of one food that has no sauce at all. What can be more miserable than to be on a long trip, eating out every night and sometimes afternoons too, in restaurants where all the food is sauced—and usually heavily—and then having to face yet another menu of sauces? And yet if one is hungry and has been looking forward to a rather grand dinner, what can content the soul more than a great bordelaise sauce, the perfectly clean roasting or braising juices reduced with a little wine, with the soft, unctuous, pale-rose glistening rich nuggets of bone marrow just waiting to dissolve in one’s mouth against a bite of grilled, rosemary-scented double lamb chop? Or the awesome périgueux sauce, with its fresh black truffles, Madeira, and meat glaze? In fact, there is hardly a sauce that I don’t like, except for Cumberland sauce, but I do object to the attempts to keep certain sauces alive when their day has passed. Financière, for example, which is not a sauce so much as a garnish, continues to appear on menus. Even if it is made correctly, no one can afford to serve it anymore with its real Madeira sauce, veal quenelles, wild mushrooms, cocks’ combs, cocks’ testicles, chicken livers, and fresh black truffles.