Post #1 ended with a promise: the next post would be the JSON file failing, because that is the only way I am willing to introduce a database. This is not that post. The chain resolver was promised in the same breath, it costs no infrastructure, and it cut in line. The storage failure is still coming — and by the end of this post it will be closer than it was, for reasons the resolver itself just demonstrated.

Here is what changed, in one sentence: a preparation's parent may now be any catalogued preparation, not only one of the five mothers. Here is what that did to the census, at the tag that carries it, v0.2.0:

$ uv run saucier parse
source      escoffier-1907
mothers     bechamel, espagnole, hollandaise, tomato, veloute
sauces      124
derived     50 linked to a stated parent
unresolved  74 state no base in their prose

Correction, 2026-09-01: that escoffier-1907 is the identifier this release printed, and it was wrong. The file is the New and Revised Edition of January 1909, and its own title page says so. Everything else here is unaffected and still reproduces at v0.2.0. Post three is the correction.

Twenty-nine became fifty. Still no model, no API key, no network — a regular expression got better at reading, nothing more. And the number I want to show you first is not the 24 derivations it added. It is the three it took away.

The promise, kept literally

Post #1 left Marrow Sauce as the standing embarrassment. Entry 45 opens:

Follow the proportions as indicated under "Sauce Bordelaise" (No. 32) for the necessary quantity of this sauce, the Marrow Sauce being only a variety of the Bordelaise.

An author stating a derivation in plain English, and a record answering parent: null — because Bordelaise is not a mother, and the old rule only resolved mothers. The fix was named in that post: resolve to any catalogued sauce and walk the chain. Deterministic, checkable line by line, no model required.

That rule now exists, and:

$ uv run saucier tree bordelaise
SAUCE BORDELAISE  [bordelaise]
└── MARROW SAUCE  (en)

Readers of post #1 have seen this picture before. One arrow in it is different now.

Correction, 2026-09-03: this figure and the paragraph beneath it say the book never spells out that half glaze is a reduction of Espagnole. It does, at entry 23, line 1437, in the first sentence of an entry the parser at this tag could not see. The figure is left as printed, because it shows what the parser recorded. The post about line 1437 is the correction.

Notice what did not change. Bordelaise's own parent is still null. Its opening names shallots, red wine, mignonette pepper, thyme, bay, and half a pint of half-glaze — and a demi-glace is an Espagnole reduction, which every reader of Escoffier knew and the book therefore never says. The resolver could have special-cased it in one line. It did not, because a term that encodes a derivation is not a statement of one, and the moment this parser records one inference it stops being the baseline the eventual model gets measured against. Bordelaise staying unresolved is not a gap in this release. It is the bar the model post will have to clear, set in print for the second time.

Widening the net without catching ice cream

The obvious risk here has a precedent. Post #1's original census put vanilla ice cream in the sauce catalogue because a substring test matched hollandaise inside BOMBE HOLLANDAISE. The old parent rule had five candidate names to match. This one has every name in the catalogue — well over a hundred, in two languages, many of them containing each other. Widening the candidate set widens the ways a match can be wrong. The whole job of this release was to take the wider set without the wider wrongness.

Three rules do that work, and each one exists because the corpus punished its absence (ADR-0008):

A statement is a whole run of words inside one sentence. Folding an opening paragraph flattens punctuation, and a matcher that joins words across a full stop is the ice cream defect wearing a new costume. tomatoes is still not tomato, and a name split across two sentences is not a name.

A run inside the entry's own name states an ingredient, not a parent. Entry 138, HORSE-RADISH SAUCE (line 3091), opens with "finely-rasped horse-radish" — words that match the catalogued HORSE-RADISH OR ALBERT SAUCE (entry 119, line 2804). It is naming its own subject. It stays unresolved. Mothers are exempt from this rule, because a mother is never an entry's own subject — which is why LENTEN ESPAGNOLE still resolves to Espagnole.

A longer stated name shadows the shorter one inside it. Entry 38, Genevoise (line 1769), opens with "add one pint of Lenten Espagnole". The word "Espagnole" sits inside that name. Reading both would turn one clear statement into a fake ambiguity; reading only the longer one records what the author wrote. Under the old rule Genevoise resolved straight to the mother Espagnole — which sounds right and is wrong. The source says Lenten Espagnole, entry 24, line 1449, a catalogued preparation with its own stated parent. So the record now holds a chain, every derivation in it stated:

$ uv run saucier tree espagnole
BROWN SAUCE OR ESPAGNOLE  [espagnole]
├── LENTEN ESPAGNOLE  (fr)
│   └── GENEVOISE SAUCE  (en)
├── ORDINARY POIVRADE SAUCE  (en)
│   └── REFORM SAUCE  (en)
└── POIVRADE SAUCE FOR VENISON  (en)

Escoffier's structure was never a five-way star. The tree finally has the depth the book always had.

The three answers it gave back

Ambiguity still resolves to nothing: exactly one candidate in the opening paragraph, or no parent. Post #1 made that rule sound like modesty. This release shows what it is actually for — because with more candidates in play, the rule started dissolving derivations the old parser had recorded.

ANDALOUSE SAUCE (entry 122, line 2855) was on the books as derived from the mother Tomato. Its opening reads:

Take the required quantity of Mayonnaise sauce (No. 126) and add to it the quarter of its volume of very red and concentrated tomato purée…

The old rule could only see mothers, found the word "tomato", and recorded a derivation — read off an ingredient purée. The new rule sees two candidate names, Mayonnaise and tomato, and two candidates means no parent. The wider net did not just add derivations. It exposed one of the old ones as exactly the grilled-tomatoes defect post #1 was about, one rung further up. Chaud-froid au vert-pré (entry 75, line 2258) went the same way: its opening names the velouté and the white Chaud-Froid sauce, the source chose neither, so neither does the record.

The third one took a human. Post #1's census bugs were caught by a review tool; this release's was caught by a person reviewing the pull request, and it is the same species of defect one layer deeper. The resolver bound each mother to a catalogued entry by preferring the least qualified name — which bound the mother velouté to THICKENED VELOUTÉ, an alias of Allemande (entry 27), instead of ORDINARY VELOUTÉ SAUCE (entry 25). Ordinary Chaud-froid (entry 73, line 2242) opens with "substituting Allemande Sauce for the velouté" — two stated candidates, which the bad binding collapsed into one, so the record answered velouté where the ambiguity rule owed it nothing. The fix binds a mother to the first preparation in source order that answers to its name, because the source states a base before its derivatives — and entry 73 dissolved into the unresolved column, moving the census from 51 to 50 before either number ever got published.

A resolver that can only add derivations is a ratchet. This one handed back three confident answers because the evidence for them stopped clearing the bar, and that — more than the 24 additions — is why the additions are believable.

SHRIMP SAUCE (entry 80, line 2322) still names fish velouté "or, failing this, Béchamel", still gets no parent, and is still the correct answer.

Every changed record, with receipts

Post #1 counted twenty-seven unresolved preparations that name another catalogued sauce in their opening. The resolver records twenty-four new derivations — the difference is the gap between naming and stating, which is precisely the gap the three rules above enforce. Add the three dissolved derivations and Genevoise's corrected parent and 28 records changed, every one checkable with sed -n against the committed corpus:

Read down the after column and the book's real middle layer appears: plain Butter Sauce quietly picks up five children — caper, gooseberry, mustard, fennel, and the Albert sauce. Normande gains four. And down in the dessert chapter, Sauce Orange and the Greengage resolve to Apricot Sauce — which is itself unresolved, so the tree now roots in a preparation that states no base of its own:

$ uv run saucier tree apricot-sauce
APRICOT SAUCE  [apricot-sauce]
├── SAUCE ORANGE  (fr)
└── GREENGAGE OR MIRABELLE SAUCE  (en)

That render is not an edge case someone forgot to reject. It is the data model saying what the source says: these two derive from that one, and that one keeps its counsel. Unresolved is a fact about the text, not a hole in the tree.

Two smaller guarantees ride along. Every new derivation carries the same provenance as every old claim — source id, entry, line — which is what made the table above checkable in an afternoon. And a preparation can never become its own ancestor: a cycle is cleared entirely rather than broken by choosing a derivation to keep, because choosing would be an arbitrary decision wearing the costume of determinism, and this project already shipped one of those (SHRIMP SAUCE, resolved to Béchamel because B sorts before V, corrected in post #1).

What this prices

The case for a model was priced in post #1 at 95 unresolved preparations. It is now priced at 74, and the discount came from the cheapest possible vendor: a stricter reading of what the source already says.

That matters for how the eventual model gets judged. Every derivation a deterministic pass can recover is one the model no longer gets credit for recovering. What remains in the 74 is the genuinely hard residue — Bordelaise, where the derivation hides inside the term half-glaze; Shrimp, where the author offered two bases and committed to neither; and the long tail of preparations that simply never say. When a model finally reads those, its score will mean something, because everything a regular expression could honestly claim has already been claimed.

What it cost to write 28 fields

One more number, and it is the ending post #1 actually promised. Changing 28 parents meant rewriting the entire catalogue — all 124 records, serialized back out as one JSON file, because that is the entire storage layer. This release felt the cost that post #1 only predicted: the write is all-or-nothing, the diff is the whole file, and every future rule that touches a handful of records will pay the same full-file toll. The next post is that seam finally tearing, and what replaces it — which is still the only way I am willing to introduce a database.

Everything here reproduces from the tag:

$ git clone https://github.com/Alberto-Codes/saucier
$ cd saucier && git checkout v0.2.0
$ uv sync && uv run saucier parse

124 sauces. 50 derived, every derivation stated. 74 that keep their counsel, on purpose. If you find a stated parent the resolver missed — or an inferred one it should never have recorded — the issue template asks for the entry number and the source lines, because a claim about this project should be checkable the same way the project's own claims are.

The release: saucier v0.2.0 — the resolver this post argues for: a parent may be any catalogued preparation, derived goes from 29 to 50, three derivations the old rule recorded are given back, and Bordelaise stays unresolved on purpose. MIT.