Mixing the humorous with the erudite, this book is stuffed with tasty anecdotes from the history of sauce-making in France. It is also a cry from the heart, deploring the disappearance of the great French sauces from our plates. For they werebanished during the second half of the last century, when they werefound guilty of dietary heresy. The pioneering chef Yannick Alléno lifts the veil on cutting-edge techniques that enable a chef to create a sauce like a winemaker produces a great vintage. These new sauces lie at the heart of Alléno's cuisine moderne. Along the way, the reader is taken on a fascinating historical journey from antiquity to the future, and through the very DNA of French cuisine.