When I was in school they tentatively added butter to the mother sauce list with compound butters being considered small sauces. They were also steering us away from the use of sauces (this was the mid 70s) justifying this move by saying the classic sauces were developed in Europe for the purpose of disguising rank flavors resulting from the lack of refrigeration at that time. They maintained that since we had fresh meat, sauces were no longer needed. I had a local chef more or less taunting me one night at the local watering hole over what he considered my lack of knowlege compared to his. As proof of my ignorance, he asked me to define buerre rouge. Of course I had no idea (red butter-what could make it red?) so he hooted and said if I didn't know that, I didn't know anythng. I asked my brother in law (Cordon Bleu grad) if he knew, he didn't so I guess he's stupid too. I ended up looking it up in La
Rousse's and found it was either shrimp or crawfish shells that were rubbed through a fine seive and blended with butter to be served with seafood. Seems there's a faction of the nouvelle crowd who thinks buerre rouge is buerre blanc made red wine instead of white and they serve it with beef. So it seems there is a lot of confusion out there regarding sauces.  |