Two earlier posts in this series carry a figure of the same four sauces: the one where ice cream got into the catalogue, and the one where Marrow Sauce finally got a parent. At the top of that figure is Espagnole. A dashed arrow runs from it down to half glaze, and the arrow is labelled assumed, not stated — half glaze, the caption says, is "a reduction of Espagnole the book never spells out." The Marrow Sauce post goes further in prose: a demi-glace is an Espagnole reduction, "which every reader of Escoffier knew and the book therefore never says."

saucier is a parser that reads Escoffier's 1909 Guide to Modern Cookery and records only what the book states. Here is entry 23 of that text, at line 1437, in the chapter Escoffier titles The Leading Warm Sauces:

HALF GLAZE. This is the Espagnole sauce, having reached the limit of perfection by final despumation. It is obtained by reducing one quart of Espagnole and one quart of first-class brown stock until its volume is reduced to nine-tenths of a quart.

The book says it. It says it in the first sentence of a numbered entry, in the sauce chapter, nine entries before Bordelaise. I published two posts and two figures asserting the book never says it, because my parser could not see entry 23, and I believed my parser over the book.

The parser could not see it because the rule that decides what counts as a sauce had two tests, and the second could overrule the first. This release deletes the second test. Here is what that does to the census at v0.4.0:

$ uv run saucier parse
escoffier-1909  New and Revised Edition, January 1909 (impression: January 1920)
                transcription of Project Gutenberg 71395
                mothers: bechamel, espagnole, hollandaise, tomato, veloute
                151 sauces, 57 derived, 94 unresolved
escoffier-1907  no edition stated, copyright 1907
                ocr of Internet Archive cu31924000610117
                mothers: bechamel, espagnole, hollandaise, tomato, veloute
                140 sauces, 50 derived, 90 unresolved

At v0.3.0 the 1909 line read 124, 50, 74. Twenty-seven sauces entered. Unresolved rose by twenty, and every one of the twenty is something the parser could not see before: an entry my rule hid, or an ambiguity that was invisible while the entry was hidden. The honest number got worse because the instrument got better. And derived rose by seven, which is the misleading number, for the best reason in the release.

The clause that vetoed Escoffier

Escoffier opens the chapter at line 1246 by saying what his sauces are:

Warm sauces are of two kinds: the leading sauces, also called "mother sauces," and the small sauces, which are usually derived from the first-named, and are generally only modified forms thereof.

The ice cream post introduced ADR-0007: the source decides what counts as a sauce, because deciding for ourselves is what put vanilla ice cream in the catalogue. Under that record an entry enters on two kinds of evidence. Its heading says "sauce". Or the source filed it in a chapter Escoffier titles as sauces — and its heading also names one of the five mothers.

That second test has two clauses. The chapter clause reads the source's own classification. The mother clause adds a test of mine on top of the reading, and when the two disagree, mine wins. A second test on a classification the source has already made is a veto, not a check.

I wrote the mother clause to keep LENTEN ESPAGNOLE and VELOUTÉ DE VOLAILLE, two derivatives in the sauce chapters whose headings never use the word. It kept them. ADR-0015 counts what it cost, in the three sauce chapters of the 1909 text:

The 27 are the three roux, half glaze, two gravies, a lobster method that Escoffier numbered as its own entry, whisked mayonnaise, various cullises, and 18 compound butters from the chapter titled Cold Sauces and Compound Butters. Every one of them is an entry the source classified. My rule classified them again and lost.

Here is what that looked like on screen, at v0.3.0:

$ uv run saucier show robert-sauce --chars 260
ROBERT SAUCE
entry 52, line 1994, transcription of escoffier-1909
  term  ROBERT SAUCE  [en]  robert-sauce
  parent  (unresolved)

Finely mince a large onion and put it into a stewpan with butter. Fry
the onion gently and without letting it acquire any colour. Dilute
with one-third pint of white wine, reduce the latter by one-third,
add one pint of half-glaze, and leave to simmer for twen...
[378 more characters, raise --chars to read them]

The record and the sentence that contradicts it, four lines apart, for three releases. Eleven sauces name half glaze in their opening paragraph. Five name a roux. The book writes the chain in full — brown roux, Espagnole, half glaze, Robert — and the catalogue had dropped the middle link.

The new rule is one sentence: an entry inside a sauce chapter qualifies on the chapter, and an entry outside one qualifies on its heading alone. The function that decides admission went from five lines to one:

return names_a_sauce(title) or in_sauce_chapter

The mothers are still read, for the catalogue and for resolution, and they take no part in admission. Nothing is hand-excluded to make the result tidy: VARIOUS CULLISES is entry 144, numbered inside a sauce chapter, and it is in the catalogue now. An admitted entry that reads oddly as a preparation is a finding, not a special case in the parser.

Twelve gained, and one of them was the bar

With half glaze and the roux in the catalogue, the chain resolver from the Marrow Sauce post has something to resolve against. Twelve sauces now record the parent Escoffier wrote, and none of them needed a new rule to do it:

Bordelaise is on that list, and the Marrow Sauce post made a point of Bordelaise. Its opening names half a pint of half glaze and never says Espagnole, so it stayed unresolved — "not a gap in this release," I wrote, but "the bar the model post will have to clear." The bar is cleared, and no model cleared it. A chapter test cleared it, by letting the resolver see an entry that was in the book the whole time.

$ uv run saucier tree espagnole
BROWN SAUCE OR ESPAGNOLE  [espagnole]  derives from brown-roux
├── HALF GLAZE  (en)
│   ├── SAUCE BORDELAISE  (fr)
│   │   └── MARROW SAUCE  (en)
│   ├── BROWN CHAUD-FROID SAUCE  (en)
│   ├── DEVILLED SAUCE  (en)
│   ├── ITALIAN SAUCE  (en)
│   ├── LYONNAISE SAUCE  (en)
│   ├── MADEIRA SAUCE  (en)
│   ├── PIQUANTE SAUCE  (en)
│   └── ROBERT SAUCE  (en)
├── LENTEN ESPAGNOLE  (fr)
│   └── GENEVOISE SAUCE  (en)
├── ORDINARY POIVRADE SAUCE  (en)
└── POIVRADE SAUCE FOR VENISON  (en)

That heading line is new. Escoffier names five mothers, and that does not change. But Espagnole opens with "one lb. of brown roux dissolved in a tall, thick saucepan with six quarts of brown stock," and the catalogue can now see the roux, so a mother may state a parent. It cannot see the stock: brown stock is entry 7, in Fonds de Cuisine, a chapter Escoffier does not title as sauces. The chapter decides, and Chapter I decided stocks.

Ten lost, and they are the finding

Derived rose from 50 to 57, and seven is three numbers: twelve sauces gained a parent, five admitted entries state one of their own, and ten sauces that were resolved at v0.3.0 are unresolved now. Eighteen of the 27 admissions are compound butters, and seven of the ten losses are sauces that now see a compound butter beside their old parent. The butters that came in are the butters that took Cardinal's parent away.

Here is Cardinal, which is the shape of all ten, with a line that did not exist at v0.3.0:

$ uv run saucier show cardinal-sauce
CARDINAL SAUCE
entry 69, line 2192, transcription of escoffier-1909
  term  CARDINAL SAUCE  [en]  cardinal-sauce
  parent  (unresolved)
  stated  bechamel, lobster-butter

And the paragraph beneath it, with the two verbs the resolver cannot read:

Boil one pint of Béchamel, to which add one-half pint of fish fumet and a little truffle essence, and reduce by a quarter. Finish the sauce, when dishing up, with three tablespoonfuls of cream and three oz. of very red lobster butter (No. 149).

At v0.3.0 Cardinal recorded bechamel, and that was correct. Lobster butter was on the page then too, at entry 149, but the mother clause had kept it out of the catalogue, so as far as the resolver could see it was an ingredient with no entry. Now it is catalogued, the opening paragraph states two catalogued names, and ADR-0012 says what happens then: the resolver refuses. It may not rank. So Cardinal is unresolved, and so are Nantua, Noisette, Diplomate, Joinville, Herb and Ravigote, each with at least one butter beside its old parent. Périgueux, Reform and Chasseur lose theirs the same way to half glaze, which now sits beside the base each of them names.

The refusal is correct under the rule as written, and the rule as written is wrong about this sentence. The source stated one base and one finish. Any cook reading the paragraph knows which is which. The resolver reads names. It cannot tell a base from a finish, because it has never been asked to read the verb a name sits inside — and until it can, the honest answer is the refusal.

I could recover all ten this afternoon. A rule that prefers a mother when one is stated would put Cardinal back on Béchamel and the derived count back near 67. I am not doing it, and the reason is the second-copy post's Aurore sauce. The candidate rule is not tuned to save the number. Every tuning of it that saves Cardinal is a choice made by me rather than a statement made by the book, and the whole value of the unresolved count is that it has never contained one of those.

What the release does instead is make the refusal readable. That stated line names every catalogued candidate the opening paragraph states, in the order the paragraph states them. The adjudication this tool cannot perform still exists only in me. But the evidence I would adjudicate from is now on screen next to the refusal, which is the most the parser is entitled to do.

One of the twelve gains belongs in this section too. MOUSSEUSE SAUCE resolves to manied butter, because its opening calls for "one-half lb. of stiffly-manied butter" and manied butter is now a catalogued entry. The same paragraph continues: "This preparation, though classified as a sauce, is really a compound butter." Escoffier classified it as a sauce and said in the same breath that the classification was a courtesy. The catalogue reads the chapter and records the sauce. The reader reads the sentence and knows better. It stays as recorded. I would rather carry a visible oddity than an invisible rule.

What it did to the scan

The 1907 witness moves from 115 sauces, 36 derived, 79 unresolved to 140, 50, 90. Twenty-five entries entered, not 27. MONTPELLIER BUTTER is on the page at line 3782 of the scan, and HAZEL-NUT BUTTER at 3816:

$ sed -n '3782p;3816p' corpus/escoffier-1907.txt
IS3— MONTPELLIER  BUTTER
15s— HAZEL-NUT  BUTTER

IS3 for 153, 15s for 155. The entry pattern wants digits and never matches, so both sit inside the 284-entry blind spot the second-copy post measured. Repairing them means deciding that S is 5 from outside the document, and ADR-0013 makes no such decision.

The scan also reads two entry numbers twice, 138 and 63, and until this release the catalogue used the number as a preparation's identity, so the later entry's bookkeeping overwrote the earlier one's. A preparation is now identified by the line its heading sits on, which is unique in both witnesses and is the field a reader checks by hand.

The diff moves from 9 unmatched, 18 parent-changed, 35 ocr-suspected to 11, 19, 36. Three of the new rows are the Aurore shape again: HERB, RAVIGOTE and PÉRIGUEUX state two candidates in the proofread text and refuse, the scan hides one candidate in each, and the scan answers. A damaged witness confidently resolving what a clean witness honestly cannot was described once as a finding. It has now happened four times.

Worse than the scanner, in one specific way

The second-copy post gave this series its second rule, observed, never assumed, and wrote it down as ADR-0014: a damaged witness cannot establish absence.

I wrote that record about a scanner. Ten days later the same failure turned up on the clean witness, in a proofread transcription with no OCR damage anywhere in it. The blind spot was a clause I wrote, and the absence it produced went into two posts, two figures, and the published claim that the book never spells out what it spells out at line 1437. The project had 243 tests when I found it, and every one of them was green.

The scan's blind spot could be measured, because there was a clean witness to measure it against. The mother clause's blind spot had no second witness to reveal it, because both copies of the book went through the same rule.

A second copy of the book cannot catch an error in the reader. Only a second reader can, and the second reader here was a person following the chain Robert states, by hand, and asking why the middle of it was not in the catalogue.

Both earlier posts now carry a dated note beside their figure. The figures are left as printed, because what they show is genuinely what the parser recorded at those tags. What they say about the book was wrong.

What I am not claiming

Not one of the ten lost derivations is a finding about Escoffier. Every one is a finding about a resolver that reads names and not verbs. And the 27 admitted entries are a claim about where Escoffier put them, not about what a sauce is — if a lobster method numbered as its own entry in the sauce chapter is not a sauce, the argument is with the book's table of contents.

Everything here reproduces from the tag:

$ git clone https://github.com/Alberto-Codes/saucier
$ cd saucier && git checkout v0.4.0
$ uv sync && uv run saucier parse
$ uv run saucier show cardinal-sauce
$ uv run saucier tree espagnole

That prints 151 sauces and 140, the chain from brown roux to Robert that the book has always written in full, and a stated line under Cardinal naming the two things it says, in the order it says them. If you can tell me a rule that reads "finish the sauce with" as a finish and not a base, without reading anything the sentence does not contain, the issue template asks for the entry number and the source lines. Entry 69, line 2192 is a good place to start.

The release: saucier v0.4.0 — the mother clause deleted: the second test is the chapter clause alone and the heading test still stands beside it, the 27 entries Escoffier filed among his own sauces come back, ten derivations are given up on purpose, and a preparation is identified by the line its heading sits on rather than by an entry number the scan reads twice. MIT.