In 2009, my parents came over from the US and we took a trip to Italy: Florence, Pisa, and Rome. The food, of course, was gorgeous, but often clashed with what my mother thought of as "Italian" food—the type that one gets in the northeastern US, where Italian immigrants brought over a lot of southern Italian dishes, which were then adapted as tastes and ingredients changed. Because of this, she repeatedly asked "Is it in a red sauce?" Many of the waiters found this a strange question, but they could deal with strange questions from paying foreigners. My British spouse, however, found it too annoying: "What do you MEAN?" And Mom would say "You know, a red sauce. Like [AmE] spaghetti sauce". But he didn't necessarily know, because naming sauces by colo(u)r seems to be a peculiarly monocultural thing.
red sauce
Red sauce was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 2005, so its definition is pretty up-to-date and shows the American sense:
(a) n. Any of various sauces that are red in colour, esp. (in the United States) a tomato-based sauce of southern Italian origin; (b) adj. (attributive) U.S. of or designating a type of Italian American cuisine characterized by the use of tomato-based sauces.
Wikipedia tells us:
Red sauce may refer to:
- Marinara sauce, in the United States
- Ketchup, in the United Kingdom and Ireland
- Salsa roja, in Mexican cuisine
- Red curry, in Thai cuisine
That list demands a translation and a synonym. Marinara sauce in AmE refers to a rather plain tomato sauce for pasta—the default pasta sauce in the US. It is so-called because it was reputedly the kind of simple sauce made or eaten by Neapolitan sailors. In the UK, one sees the word marinara on Italian menus referring to seafood sauces.
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| An Australian ketchup |
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| An American passata |
brown sauce
The British have brown sauce, of which HP Sauce is the original and most famous example. It's a condiment one buys in a bottle, made with vinegar, fruits, and some form of sugar. It is most often used with breakfast, and we've seen it before in my opus about bacon sandwiches.
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| Wikipedia's photo at brown sauce |
In this vein, Americans have A.1. Sauce, which we never call brown sauce. Since the 1960s, it's been marketed as A.1. Steak Sauce—which points to another American sauce term. Steak sauce, Wikipedia tells us, is:
a tangy sauce commonly served as a condiment for beef in the United States. Two of its major producers are British companies
Back to brown sauce. The OED definition has not been updated since 1888, and it has only the French-cuisine inspired meaning, akin to gravy: "A brown-coloured savoury sauce, esp. one made with browned fat and flour." When I was a(n American) child in the 1970s–80s learning about cooking, I learned this among other sauce terms—though I can't say I've ever heard it in my adult life.
But brown sauce was another bit of my mother's terminology that didn't help when travel(l)ing: she'd talk about her Chinese food preferences in terms of preferring brown sauce over white sauce, and British Spouse didn't understand what she meant. But, she knew what she was talking about. Goodcooking.com has a story about a sauce master at a Chinese restaurant which includes (with recipes):
Two basic sauces are the brown sauce and white sauce. Brown sauce is mainly for meat dishes; beef, lamb, duck, yet he also used it in his Chendu Fish dish, to bind together moo shu and one of his tofu dishes. The white sauce was for fish and seafood, chicken and vegetable dishes. Other ingredients such as black beans, chili with garlic, preserved vegetable, ginger and garlic were added as items cooked and then his sauces were added, seconds before service to bind everything into a flavorful dish.
From the spelling of flavorful, we can guess that this Chinese restaurant was in the US, and from a little knowledge of Chinese food in the anglosphere, I would guess that (a) this might be based in some specific regional Chinese cuisine, and (b) the term is not much used in British Chinese cuisine. Having had a lot of Chinese takeaways/takeout in the US, UK and South Africa, I can report that even if you're ordering a dish of the same name (chicken in garlic sauce, sweet-and-sour pork, General Tso's chicken etc.), they are very different in different places. (Let's just say: my English family always makes a point of having Chinese food when we're in the US.) Yummly.co.uk has many recipes for Chinese brown sauce, but, despite the 'uk' in its URL, all the brown-sauce recipes I checked there have American terminology (cornstarch, scallions, chicken broth/bouillon etc.). If there were any urge to call Chinese sauce base brown in British English, it would probaby be blocked by the clash with the breakfasty condiment.
white sauce
- In (US, at least) Chinese cuisine, it's the opposite of brown sauce. (This site says it's typical of Cantonese cooking.)
- A sauce base made of "roux of butter and flour combined with milk or cream" (OED).
Finally,
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ReplyDeleteReminds me of a story a friend told me about her department's Christmas dinner many years ago. It started with fish in a white sauce, which everyone found rather bland and much salt and pepper was used by the diners. Then there was turkey and all the trimmings. Finally was supposed to be Christmas pudding in brandy sauce. There was a general sound of disgust when people started eating this. Turns out, the fish had been served in the base of the brandy sauce and the pudding served in the fish sauce.
ReplyDeleteI remember a school lunch in about 1978, that was supposed to be minced/ground beef pie, chips/fries and gravy, followed by steamed pudding/(not a thing in the US) hot cake? and chocolate sauce.
DeleteOf course, they mixed up the gravy and chocolate sauce. Yuck!
I remember my uncle and father doing the same thing during lunch with my grandmother one day. Neither said a word, out of politeness, until my grandmother discovered what they had been up to, whereupon general hilarity occurred, particularly on the part of my mother and aunt!
DeleteSeems like this is a theme for jokes/gags in UK based media. In an episode of Annika the eponymous character mistakes a tub of gravy for chocolate sauce.
DeleteMy mum, who was a nursery school teacher, made a large amount of salt dough for making Christmas tree ornaments with the kids.
DeleteMy dad mistook it for pastry dough and made steak and kidney pie with it.
This is an exciting post for me because my mother (Singaporean, lives in the UK, usually speaks BrE) definitely refers to marinara and alfredo as "red sauce" and "white sauce". Going to ask her why — or if there's some Singaporean/regional UK reason for this that people here might know about, I'd be delighted to hear it.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about Singapore, but in the UK you get Thai green curry and red curry.
Delete> As far as red sauce referring to ketchup in the UK, I have heard it, but not often.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's a regional thing, but in Scotland this is quite common. Not as common as referring to it as 'tomato ketchup' but not infrequent, so I was surprised to read that you've not often heard it.
On the same colour topic, you say that 'tomato sauce' in the US 'is the equivalent of the stuff that in BrE is usually called passata or tomato purée', but I don't think that's right. Passata is uncooked pureed tomatoes, and I struggled to find it when visiting the US (all the tomato sauces were cooked pureed tomatoes). And 'tomato purée' in the UK is a very concentrated tomato puree that you squeeze out of a tube (e.g. https://www.suma-store.coop/products/suma-wholefoods/suma-organic-tomato-puree---200g/).
Thanks for the clarifications. I use passata where my US recipes call for 'tomato sauce', so they're close enough for me. I'll correct the bit about purée. That's what we'd call 'tomato paste' in AmE.
DeleteAll over the north of England you pretty commonly hear red and brown sauce, whether that's in a greasy spoon, a mid-range café or (very rare for me) a more high end restaurant.
DeleteI would expect to hear/read Italian sauces as something like "in a tomato-based sauce" or "in a cream-based sauce." If I were in an Italian restaurant and read 'in red sauce' or 'in white sauce' I'd probably understand it, but it's not what I expect to read.
East Anglia ketchup was always called tomato sauce (going back 50 years) well at least for the rest of my family. But I did hear other people say red sauce from time to time. I absolutely hate the stuff.
DeleteIn these days of "UPF" I'd be suspicious of someone referring to red sauce instead of tomato sauce, as there might be some factory-produced red sludge as the main ingredient, instead of actual tomatoes.
DeleteMy British family usually say tomato ketchup as it sits in the cupboard next to a bottle of mushroom ketchup. The latter is mostly used as an ingredient when cooking, though occasionally as a condiment.
ReplyDeleteChambers gives catsup as an alternative spelling of ketchup and I have a modern selection from Johnson's dictionary in which he defines catsup as "A kind of pickle, made from mushrooms."
DeleteIndeed, tomato ketchup originated in the 19th century, after Johnson's time; before then there was mushroom ketchup and walnut ketchup, and before then, English ketchup recipes involved fermented anchovies, imitating Southeast Asian fermented fish sauce. For more on this convoluted story, see Ketchup at The Language of Food, a blog by linguist Dan Jurafsky.
DeleteI wonder why exactly 'tomato ketchup' is relatively more common to say here. It's not as if we consume a lot of banana ketchup.
ReplyDeleteBanana ketchup is getting more well known on West Coast US as food magazines introduce more "authentic" ingredients for recipes from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, etc.
DeleteYes, but by 'here' I meant the UK
DeleteI believe the first European ketchup recipes were for mushroom ketchups and nut ketchups.
Delete1970s, East Boston, Massachusetts (then a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood): red sauce was known as “gravy,” as opposed to “brown gravy.”
ReplyDeleteFinicky comment: boullion should surely be bouillon?
ReplyDeleteWill correct, thanks.
DeleteI think of tomato purée and tomato paste as two distinct items: Purée is fairly wet and comes in a regular-size can; paste is very thick and comes in mini-cans (contents must be scooped out with a spatula) or squeezable tubes.
ReplyDelete“Red sauce" for Italian food may be a US East Coast localism. I never heard it when I was growing up in Los Angeles, where the Italian presence was minimal, and I don't hear it in San Francisco, where there is a long-established Italian presence and influence, but mostly from coastal northern Italy. The local specialty here is the (reddish) fish stew called cioppino; that word comes up occasionally in Spelling Bee and seems to baffle non–San Franciscans.
Yes, the problem in the post (before I corrected it) was that I had used the AmE sense of tomato purée</i? in a BrE context. In AmE, it's sauce-like, and in BrE it's paste-like.
DeleteWe definitely had tomato sauce with our fish and chips last night. I (northern English background) might also say tomato ketchup or ketchup, but not red sauce. I would however say brown sauce, because what it's made of (dates? tamarinds??) is a mystery. Worcestershire sauce was also on the table - it's a favourite of mine. (We also had champagne - or rather, "champagne", since it was an English variety - which is obviously not a sauce but made an excellent accompaniment.)
ReplyDeleteThe thing about lasagne/a is that the Americans and the British obtained their recipe from two different areas of Italy (hence, also, the difference in spelling). I believe the British version (with bechamel sauce) came from the Bologna region, whereas the American one (with ricotta) came from the Genoa region. The same may also be true of macaroni (and) cheese, which again in Britain is made with a bechamel sauce (actually sauce Mornay, since it has cheese in it), and in the US, I believe, is literally macaroni AND cheese.....
ReplyDeleteIn the U.S., the typical homemade macaroni and cheese is made with a bechamel to which you add cheddar cheese. Even the yucky boxed stuff has a packet of powdered milk and dehydrated cheese that's reconstituted with water and butter, so it's sauce not just cheese.
DeleteWhen I was in my teens, many decades ago, I had a French pen pal. He came over for a visit. I thought my mum was a good cook in a traditional English working class style. As such (except for fish and chips on Saturdays) dinner was always served with gravy. I asked my pal how he found the food. "Oh, la sauce, toujours la sauce,!" was his response.
ReplyDeleteI've mostly heard “red sauce” meaning ketchup when it's contrast to “brown sauce”, the parallel names somehow making it more acceptable.
ReplyDeleteIn Danny Baker's Sausage Sandwich Game on Radio 5 Live (which I'm pretty sure had a different name when it started): a famous person is asked multiple-choice questions about (often fairly mundane) aspects of their life, each of which has 3 answers, and contestants guess which it will be. The final question is always: “When Lynne [or whoever] has a sausage sandwich, does she have it with red sauce, brown sauce, or no sauce at all?”
And it's always phrased like that. I don't know if Danny Baker routinely refers to ketchup as “red sauce”, but the question sounds less clunky than “with tomato ketchup, brown sauce, or neither?”.
In Philadelphia, old-fashioned Italo-American restaurants are still everywhere and locals refer to 'red gravy' and (less frequently) 'white gravy'. Red gravy means tomato-based ragù, almost always with meat. White gravy is a cream sauce, as one would find on gnocchi or fettucine Alfredo. I'd never heard either phrase before I started living here part time a bit over a decade ago, but the usage is widespread, perpetuated without irony by ethnic whites in South Philadelphia and their descendants in the burbs, and adopted for us in inverted commas by incomers and young hipsters.
ReplyDeleteMy (UK) experience is 'red sauce' is also used to mean tomato ketchup of unknown dubious provenance—that red condiment in the squeezy tomato at a greasy spoon cafe. Implicit: ketchup-looking/tasting but possibly not the real thing.
ReplyDelete'red equaliser' (and 'brown equaliser') fill the same descriptive gap: i.e. an condiment of that colour but of unknown origin.
I'm not sure brown sauce is commonly seen at the breakfast table. Other than at transport cafes and the like (where the offering is all-day), over 60 decades I can't ever recall seeing brown sauce (or ketchup) on the breakfast table.
I've only met 'White sauce' only interrelation to béchamel (flour/milk/butter base). Adding cheese in UK would make it a 'cheese sauce' (or Mornay sauce for chef-y folk). Makes sense as the two taste quite different.
As others said "red sauce" is very common, personally I always say ketchup. In Edinburgh "sauce" refers to brown sauce, if you asked for it on your chips (never fries!) thats what you'll get (a very vinegar heavy diluted version).
ReplyDeleteI always call bechemal sauce white sauce. With or without cheese. As my mum from Inverness taught me how to cook I assume I picked it off of her.
It's worth noting that Chinese food varies a lot from area to area *within* the USA, not just between the USA and other places. Duck sauce, in particular, is a widespread phrase for several wildly different types of sauces in different parts of the US.
ReplyDeleteRe "You sometimes hear in BrE the more AusE tomato sauce" (i.e. for ketchup) — are we certain this was always more AusE or always as rare in BrE as it is now? When I (USian) lived in England in the '80s, I heard "tomato sauce" for ketchup all the time, but I have only the memory of my confusion and dismay to corroborate that.
ReplyDeleteIn Taiwan if you go out for Italian (which is probably even further away from actual Italian food than American/British Italian food!) you have "red sauce" for tomato and "white sauce" for cream, and also "green sauce" for pesto.
ReplyDeleteTomato sauce sold in Australia and New Zealand is a bit different from American ketchup. Tomato sauce has a slightly thinner consistency with more vinegar. I also noticed a different spice profile in some of the brands, slightly warming spices. As an USian when living in a South Pacific country, I ate a lot of Australian and New Zealand branded tomato sauce with my burgers and chips/fries.
ReplyDeleteIn other parts of the world, I've had some UK friends say "tomato sauce", but I don't know enough about types of products offered in the UK to know if they were thinking specifically of Heinz ketchup, or the Australian-New Zealand-style tomato sauce, or a general slang term for any sort of tomato-based-sauce-into-which-one-dips-chips/fries.
While in the South Pacific, I also remember disagreeing with some Aussie friends about what marinara sauce is. For me, it is the simple thicker tomato-based sauce that is part of New York/New Jersey Italian-American cuisine with the story of the Neapolitan sailors. For them, it's a pasta dish cooked a lighter tomato-based sauce with various types of seafood, emphasizing that the word "marinara" is related to marine, which is related to the sea. We ended up agreeing to disagree, as we enjoyed/tucked into the offered seafood version with a glass of wine.
South African here. We use "tomato sauce" like the Australians seem to i.e instead of ketchup (a term we don't use). It gets a bit blurry when one is talking about a homemade tomato sauce such as one might add to pasta (pomodoro/marinara/etc) - that is usually just called homemade or fresh tomato sauce if one is speaking generically. Tomato puree and passata are used fairly well interchangeably (perhaps I am just unsophisticated), whereas tomato paste is a concentrate. "White sauce" is one made with a roux. In my experience, we don't go in for the terms brown sauce (gravy? Worcester sauce? HP sauce? chutney?) or red sauce (although we would do refer to red and green curry sauces in the context of Thai food).
DeleteIn Scotland when I was a lad (1950s/60s) the red stuff was 'sauce' or 'tomato sauce'. I puzzled over the word 'ketchup' on the label because I never heard it spoken. Chips (BrE) from a chip shop came with the question 'salt and sauce?' and that sauce was 'brown sauce', but much runnier than HP sauce (although maybe it was just the latter diluted).
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what A1 sauce is like but my favourite is OK (Mason's/Colmans) which is also made in England for the Asian market and available in Chinese stores here.
ReplyDeleteJust checked. A1 sauce was made by Henderson Brand whose nephew George Mason made OK sauce as an Imitation of A1 for the British market.
ReplyDeleteMy husband's family is Sicilian, and they use the terms ‘red sauce’ and ‘white sauce’ for marinara (of any complexity due to its tomato base) and Alfredo.
ReplyDelete