Nuts and Seeds

Nuts have been used in sauce making since Roman times and are still used in rough-textured purées—the best known is pesto—and to thicken Indian curries. In medieval European cooking, they were often used in conjunction with bread and sometimes cooked egg yolks to thicken sauces and cooking liquids. In seventeenth-century recipes for roux, almond flour was often included along with wheat flour. Gradually, classical French cooking abandoned nuts as thickeners in favor of starches and eventually cream, butter, and now hydrocolloids, but the use of nuts in sauce making is still common in European regional cooking and in Indian cooking. Sauces made with almonds, sesame seeds, pine nuts, pistachios, chestnuts, cashews, hazelnuts, and walnuts are the most common. In rough-hewn sauces, such as pestos, the nuts are ground or pounded with the other ingredients.