Sauces and Condiments

When I first learned to cook, sauces were the most intimidating aspect of cuisine. This was largely because the only sauces anyone talked about-with the exception of “spaghetti sauce”-were French. And, from a global perspective, classic French cuisine features a very unusual method of preparing sauces, often starting with stocks or even much-reduced stocks and combining flavors slowly, to build a complex, often remarkable mixture in which most of the components become unrecognizable.

Most of the rest of the world treats sauces much differently, quickly combining strong-tasting ingredients—often uncooked—to build salsas, relishes, flavored oils, pastes, and dipping sauces. Once your pantry is stocked, most of these are easily made and keep for a while (another contrast to the French model).