Sauce is a thick or liquid food that is added to other foods to give them more flavor or moisture. It can be savory, like tomato sauce, or sweet, like chocolate sauce.
From Old French *sauce*, from Latin *salsa* (as in *salsa (condimenta)*), meaning 'salted (things)', from *sal* 'salt'. Sauces were originally strongly salted seasonings.
Sauce started out meaning 'salted stuff', which makes sense when salt was the main flavor booster. Today we pour, dip, and drizzle sauces that may not be salty at all, but the name stuck. The word shows how one powerful ingredient (salt) once defined the whole category of flavor helpers.
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