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This is probably the more common, and recognizable sauce. Every culture around the Mediterranean sea and in general the countries that have the tomato as a farm product. It is probably the one sauce that can be made in 1000 different ways; with meat, with veggies, with cheese, with sea food…. And can top everything from pasta to meat. It is the only sauce that can be used as cooking media to give flavor to roasts. It is actually the only sauce that is eaten cold as well. Yeah… cold like ketchup.

The Tomato ...

The first mama of all is Béchamel. A cream sauce that is the base for half of the white sauces. It is the base not only of sauces but of a wide range of food, where it is acting as binder, and can be a desert sauce as well. When it was invented, sauce Béchamel was a slow simmering of milk, veal stock and seasonings, strained, with an enrichment of cream. The sauce under its familiar name first appeared in Le Cuisinier François, (published in 1651), by François Pierre La Varenne (1615 – 1678), chef de cuisine to Nicolas Chalon du Blé, marquis d’Uxelles. The foundation of French cuisine, the Cuisinier François ran through some thirty editions in seventy-five years. The sauce was named to flatter a courtier, Louis de Béchameil, marquis de Nointel (1630 – 1703), a financier, sometime intendant of Brittany, who is sometimes mistakenly credited with having invented it. Many chefs would now regard as authoritative the recipe of Auguste Escoffier presented in Saulnier’s Répertoire: “White roux moistened with milk, salt, onion stuck with clove, cook for 20 minutes”. The sauce called velouté, in which a blond roux is whisked into a white stock, is a full hundred years older, having appeared in the cookbook of Sabina Welserin in 1553.

This basic sauce, one o...

The word “sauce” is a French word that means a relish to make our food more appetizing. Sauces are liquid or semi-liquid foods devised to make other foods look, smell, and taste better, and hence be more easily digested and more beneficial. Because of the lack of refrigeration in the early days of cooking, meat, poultry, fish, and seafood didn’t last long. Sauces and gravies were used to mask the flavor of tainted foods.

In addition sauce...

This the last cocktail of the six famous cocktails. It is probably the least famous cocktail of the david A. Embury ‘s coctails. Jack Rose is the name of a classic cocktail, popular in the 1920s and 1930s, containing applejack, grenadine, and lemon or lime juice. It notably appeared in a scene in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 classic, The Sun Also Rises, in which Jake Barnes, the narrator, drinks a Jack Rose in a Paris hotel bar while awaiting the arrival of Lady Brett Ashley.

Last ...

The first known definition of the word “cocktail” was in response to a reader’s letter asking to define the word in the May 6, 1806 issue of The Balance and Columbia Repository in Hudson, New York. In the May 13, 1806 issue, the paper’s editor wrote that it was a potent concoction of spirits, bitters, water, and sugar. The first use of the specific name “Old Fashioned” was for a Bourbon whiskey cocktail in the 1880s, at the Pendennis Club, a gentlemen’s club in Louisville, Kentucky. The recipe is said to have been invented by a bartender at that club, and popularized by a club member and bourbon distiller, Colonel James E. Pepper, who brought it to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel bar in New York City. The Pepper family distillery is now known as Labrot & Graham.

There is great contention on the proper ...

The Sidecar is a classic cocktail traditionally made with Cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice. It is one of six basic drinks listed in David A. Embury’s classic (The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks). The exact origin of the Sidecar is unclear, but it was created around the end of World War I in either London or Paris. It is a variation on the older Brandy Daisy (brandy, yellow Chartreuse, and lemon juice). The first recipes for the Sidecar appear in 1922, in both Harry MacElhone’s Harry’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails and Robert Vermeire’s Cocktails and How to Mix Them. In early editions of MacElhone’s book, he cites the inventor as Pat MacGarry, “the Popular bar-tender at Buck’s Club, London”, but in later editions he cites himself. Vermiere states, “This cocktail is very popular in France. It was first introduced in London by MacGarry, the celebrated bar-tender of Buck’s Club.” David A. Embury (The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, 1948) credits the invention of the drink to an American Army captain in Paris during World War I “and named after the motorcycle sidecar in which the good captain was driven to and from the little bistro where the drink was born and christened”.

Both MacElhone and Vermiere state the recipe as equal parts Cognac, Cointreau...

The name Daiquirí is also the name of a beach near Santiago, Cuba, and an iron mine in that area. The cocktail was invented about 1905 in a bar named Venus in Santiago, about 23 miles east of the mine, by a group of American mining engineers. Among the engineers present were Jennings Cox, General Manager of the Spanish American Iron Co., J. Francis Linthicum, C. Manning Combs, George W. Pfeiffer, De Berneire Whitaker, C. Merritt Holmes and Proctor O. Persing. Although stories persist that that Cox invented the drink when he ran out of gin while entertaining American guests, the drink evolved naturally due to the prevalence of lime and sugar.

Manhattan is the second basic cocktail that is mentioned in the great book of bartendering “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks” by David A. Embury. A popular history suggests that the drink originated at the Manhattan Club in New York City in the early 1870s, where it was invented for a banquet hosted by Jennie Jerome (Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston’s mother) in honor of presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden. The success of the banquet made the drink fashionable, later prompting several people to request the drink by referring the name of the club where it originated – “the Manhattan cocktail.”

However, experts in mix...

One of the most famous cocktails is the Martini. Especially if you are a James bond fan then Martini is your drink. The martini is a cocktail made with gin and dry white vermouth, although substituting vodka for gin is now common. It is often described as being “crisp” or “astringent.” Over the years, the martini has become perhaps the most well-known mixed alcoholic beverage. H. L. Mencken once called the martini “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet”,and E. B. White called it “the elixir of quietude”. It is also the proverbial drink of the one-time “three-martini lunch” of business executives, now largely abandoned as part of companies’ “fitness for duty” programs.

While variations are many, a standard modern martini is a five to one ratio, m...

Mixology is referred to the art of mixing beverages alcoholic or not, usually cold in a combination that will yield a drink with a new flavor called cocktail. The word cocktail itself originally was an adjective describing a creature with a tail like that of a cock, specifically a horse with a docked tail; hence (because hunters and coach horses were generally docked) a racehorse that was not a thoroughbred, having a cock-tailed horse in its pedigree (early 19th cent.). Sense 1 (originally U.S., also early 19th cent.) is perhaps analogous, from the idea of an adulterated spirit. Later of coarse the word was used to describe the very well known alcholic (or not) beverages. The earliest known printed use of the word “cocktail,” as originally determined by David Wondrich in October 2005, was from “The Farmer’s Cabinet”, April 28, 1803, p [2]: “11. Drank a glass of cocktail — excellent for the head … Call’d at the Doct’s. found Burnham — he looked very wise — drank another glass of cocktail.” The second earliest and officially recognised known printed use of the word “cocktail” (and the most well-known) was in the May 13, 1806 edition of the Balance and Columbian Repository, a publication in Hudson, New York , where the paper provided the following answer to what a cocktail was: “Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters — it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a Democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else.”
According to the great book on bartendering “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks” by David...