I have discovered there is a proverbial expression, “the sauce is better than the fish.” This was apparently meant to be a critique of the fish, but it seems to me to express the way the world ought to work. That is, it is a compliment to the chef.

Of course, the sauce is better than the fish — and the pork and the veal and the chicken and the greens and everything. Sauce was invented to turn the bland, the unpalatable and, in some cases, the inedible into a meal to remember, a feast fit for a king.

I grew up in a place and time where the food was utilitarian, pedestrian, meat-and-potatoes tedium, unrelieved by any variety or tang (not the astronaut drink, that we had). The only handmade sauce we encountered was gravy. All the others came from a bottle — ketchup, yellow mustard, mayonnaise, salad dressing. Most supplied by Kraft or Heinz. People who eat to live have not met a decent sauce. It turns you into someone who lives to eat.

The origin of the word sauce is the Latin sal salis, that is, salt. And around the dining tables of the 1950s salt was about as saucy as things got. Today, of course, everything has changed. My wife has a bottle of organic lavender-rosemary shampoo that I suspect tastes better than most of the meals I ate for the first 20 years of my life.

Occasionally when I was a kid, we’d visit a restaurant in the big city next door to our small town, and I discovered the Italians and the Chinese seemed to put various sauces on every dish they served. Indeed, the sauces were the dishes they served — sweet and sour, red and white, creamy or tart. And they were delicious, but also viewed as a rare, daring, foreign excursion outside our comfort zone, a voyage across the salty sea of tastelessness that separated us from cuisine.

Eventually I discovered that some nearby Indian, Middle Eastern and Greek restaurants also had various condiments and sauces that added savor to the proceedings — curry and chutney and tsatziki and so forth. Very tasty, too.

My first trip abroad was to England, where the origins of boring American fare were amply attested. The Brits’ chief contributions to the world of sauces seemed to be HP and Worcestershire for the meat and malt vinegar for the fish. Boiling seemed to figure prominently among cooking methods.

The scales really fell from my eyes when I first visited France and lost my heart. It was love at first bite. Here was a land where there was a profession called saucier. The top specialist in Escoffier’s brigade de cuisine, just under the chef and sous chef, was the guy who made the sauces. This was obviously the proper way to organize life.

I learned by shoving one Lucullan morsel after another into my face that in classical French cuisine there were five mother sauces — Béchamel, Espagnole, Veloute, Hollandaise and Tomate, which were capable of infinite variation and elaboration into so-called daughter sauces. And Careme was their prophet. So Béchamel can become a Mornay or a Sauce Nantua, Espagnole can morph into a Bordelaise and so on.

There are sauces for meats, for fish, for vegetables, for salads, for crepes, for eggs, for desserts — thick gravy, rich jus, silky sabayon. Perhaps the only thing the French don’t sauce is the wine, though something like a Kir Royale comes close.

Back in the USA, I discovered the foremost American outpost of the empire of saucery, the sorcery of the kitchen, was New Orleans which managed to blend the ingredients and techniques of France with imports from Spain, the Caribbean and Africa to produce something rich and strange, a sauce fancier’s paradise.

Thanks to Spain and its North and South American heirs, we are all now also familiar with salsa in red and green profusion, moles, and on and on. Even plain old American fare has gone sauce crazy. One can now buy a dizzy range of hot sauces from piquant to infernal. And I used to drive through Tennessee a couple times a year where I would always swerve off the highway for a meal at Jack’s BBQ joint in Nashville where there was a choice of five or six homemade sauces — vinegary, ketchupy, mustardy, spicy creamy and so on.

Ever since nouvelle cuisine and the fear of cholesterol and obesity which sought to ban butter and eggs, various minimalist movements have swept in and out of vogue. I regard them all as vile counter-revolutions against a more fully sauced life, a retrograde attempt to reimpose a Puritan straightjacket on our taste buds.

I have nothing against sustainability, organic, farm-to-table, locavore, slow food or foraging, but often in the process the sauce has begun to drain away from the dish. This is wrong. Fresh, local produce or farm-raised healthy meats are very French, after all. The importance of the terroir does not apply merely to wine, but also figures in the cheese or the meat or the fish or fruit or veg.

But local isn’t prized for political or philosophical reasons, but because it tastes better and different. And no matter the origin of the ingredient it shouldn’t rule out a sauce which, if done right, accentuates and perfects what nature began, and does so with its own fine, natural, local ingredients and recipes — herbs and spices, eggs, butter, olive oil, wine reductions, stocks and demi-glace. I am getting really hungry.

If life has taught me anything, it is that food is a means to an end. No, not to stay alive. Food is a mechanism for conveying sauce to your taste buds and making you swoon with joy. The finer the ingredient, the more they cry out to be treated to the sauce they deserve. And it will not be made with Velveeta or produced by sauciers named Kraft or Heinz.