I - Household Sauces.

By sauces, let it be understood that we do not refer to the products sold in drug or grocery stores, and corked up in bottles, but to the sauces that are prepared simultaneously with the dishes that they are intended to accompany and complete.

We may divide sauces into two categories, household sauces and the classical sauces, the latter belonging to grand cookery. There are several household sauces, which a person of ordinary intelligence can learn to make. The first condition requisite is to have a kitchen supplied with stock, and with the usual seasonings and relishing herbs; the second condition is care and practice in making the liaison, or "thickening," with flour, butter, eggs, or cream, in their various combinations and developments.

The household sauces are drawn butter, 7 sauce blanche, maitre d'hotel, beutre noir, melted butter, sauce piquante, sauce poi-vrade, sauce au vin blanc, sauce poulette, sauce Tartare, green and white mayonnaise, re-moulade, Hollandaise, and others of a derivative nature.

Fine Hollandaise sauce and fine sauce blanche are both exceedingly simple in their composition, and both great tests of a cook's skill. Then why do we so rarely find them well made? This problem is as mysterious as the rarity of good dinners on this earth. The two chief causes of failure, or mediocrity, which is just as bad, are the use of inferior materials and want of attention. Cookery, especially when we enter the domain of sauces, is a very delicate art, requiring the exercise of many qualities of delicate perception. The cook who makes a perfect sauce blanche must take pleasure in his art, and perform every detail of the operation with extreme attention, vibrating over his saucepans as a painter vibrates over his picture, delicately sensitive to the changes of consistency which take place as the flour and butter become transmuted into a velvety liquid that has to the eye an aspect as of the surface of fine porcelain, close in texture, exquisite in glaze. In the cook-books you may read how to mix the materials of this sauce, but no books will teach you how to mix those materials in perfection.

Once more, in all questions concerning sauces, we cannot insist too much upon the necessity of using fine materials, and, more especially, butter of the finest and freshest. Let all the pans be scrupulously clean, and always use wooden spoons for the manipulation and stirring of sauces. Metal spoons may spoil a sauce by giving it a chill. Metal, also, is liable to be attacked by the acids used in preparing sauces.

In addition to the many sauces for the preparation of which directions are given in easily accessible cook-books, I would call attention to the following, which are apparently less known on American tables.