In French cuisine, a number of sauces can be considered "daughters" of five "Mother Sauces". The five mothers are Béchamel, Espagnole, Velouté, Hollandaise and Tomate. This graph shows the relationship between these sauces and numerous daughters. Several sauces shown do not have French origins.

Parts of the graph are contentious. For instance, as a mother sauce Espagnole should not be considered a daughter of Velouté. It is drawn as if it were in order to empasize the similarity in ingredients between the two. Similarly, a roux is not so much a sauce as an ingredient; a mixture of fat and flour used to thicken sauces. Most of the daughters of Espagnole Sauce could equally be made from a Demi-glace.

It is definitely worth considering that the author is not a Chef, and has drawn the graph based on data from numerous sources, principally Wikipedia and The Oxford Companion to Food.

The code to generate the graph uses D3, and is loosely based on code by Mike Bostock. The data file backing this graph is free for any use with no rights reserved, it can be downloaded here or found on BitBucket.