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Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Anna Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories,

their poetry, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature and get closer to the things we're missing.

Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts.

Hey, I'm Frances Lamb, and this is Splendid Table Selects,

our mini podcast about the stuff that makes us better cooks and eaters.

In French kitchens, the most respected cook is the socier, the person who makes the sauces.

You can't have tacos without salsa, and Beyonce keeps hot sauce in her bag, so obviously

sauces are key to food. But what is a sauce, technically?

And how do we start making them?

Marianne Tebben is a head of the food studies department at Bard College at Simon's Rock,

and she wrote a book called Sources, A Global History.

Our friend Noel Carter found out all about them.

Have a listen.

Marian, I'm so excited to speak with you today. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

What would you say constitutes a sauce? How would you define it?

So it's really difficult to define a sauce I've found. I like to say that sauces are not food, but they're of food,

because the basic elements are that it's a refined preparation that's a complement or a contrast to food.

So it's edible, but you don't eat it by itself.

So you have to have what the industrial food industry likes to call a host food, and then the sauce acts as a complement or a contrast. And so I say refined preparations because you can have elemental ingredients that are food adjuncts that add flavor to food, but they're not sauces like salt. And so the problem is where to go from there. So in my book, I say mainly sauces are smooth liquid preparations, but that's not true of salsa, for example.

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