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It’s love, of course, that makes a sauce. Love of the aroma, love of the texture. Love of every sauce we’ve ever seen and tasted, even the ones that didn’t agree with us.

What makes a sauce Olympic gold medal stuff? In chemical terms, sex, flavor, and pain.

In the category of sex, consider spaghetti sauce. The French dubbed tomatoes “apples of love”, claiming they had aphrodisiac qualities. But it’s the glutamate in spaghetti sauce that makes us salivate, that gets our juices flowing, according to Susan S. Schiffman, professor of medical psychology in the department of psychiatry at Duke University. Schiffman articulated the flavor set-point theory, which became the basis of the Nutri/System weight loss program. It holds that people—whether thin or overweight—have specific requirements for flavor and texture in food.

Flavor, she said, equals taste and smell. Together they prepare the body to digest food. “Spaghetti sauce has a high aromatic component and glutamate, which is a preferred taste,” she said. “The Japanese call it a ‘umami’ taste: not sweet, not sour, not salty, not bitter, but umami. We don’t have a word for that in English.”

Aromas are stimulants. “When you taste or smell something, your body is genetically programmed to release gastric acid, pancreatic polypeptides, insulin, and saliva, secretions that lead to the metabolism of food. If you don’t have those releases, then your body doesn’t recognize something as food,” Schiffman explained.

Sauces to help you eat
As an eating specialist at Duke University Hospital, her goal is to make patients want to eat. “The way I do that is with sauces,” she said. “I amplify the taste and smell of the food by adding additional ‘aroma molecules’—volatile organic compounds with food-type flavors—to the ‘fat’ portion of an oil-in-water emulsion. To make a sauce, you have to get oil droplets into a suspension. Most odorants are fat-soluble. So the more odor you get into the fat portion before you bring it into the water portion, the more flavorful your sauce will be,” Schiffman said.

Each intravenous feeding costs the hospital, and ultimately the patient, $400, she said. If she can get an ill patient to eat, then feeding the patient intravenously becomes unnecessary.

The pain of salsa
Thick, savory sauces offer comfort, but salsa prefers pain. Hot peppers incessantly talk to the three-tentacled trigeminal nerve like a raconteur in a sauna. One of the nerves goes to the tongue and serves as a modified pain receptor. When a chili’s burning sensation permeates that receptor, that is, when the nerve endings encounter capsaicin (the chemical that makes hot peppers hot), a neurotransmitter called substance P informs the brain that something painful is occurring. I learned this from Terry Acre, a professor of biochemistry at Cornell University and director of the university’s Food Research Laboratory.

Fat douses the pain, he said, because “it dissolves the capsaicin into a fat module, a particle that makes it no longer available to get on your tongue and hit receptors.” So don’t drink water to put out the fire. It only temporarily cools the pain, and in the end escalates the pain by transferring more capsaicin to your tongue.

So that’s why water doesn’t put out the fire!

Why we’re attracted to this kind of pain remains a mystery, but it’s a good thing we are. Chilis contain high concentrations of antioxidant vitamins A, C, and E, plus vitamins P (bioflavonoids), B₁ (thiamine), B₂ (riboflavin), and niacin. Curiously, there is 6 times as much vitamin C in one pepper as in an orange. Chilis also contain provitamins -, -, and -carotene and cryptoxanthin, which are transformed in the human digestive tract to vitamin A. One-half tbsp of red chili powder provides the recommended daily vitamin A requirement, wrote Beth Hanson in Chile Peppers: Hot Tips and Tasty Picks for Gardeners and Gourmets.

Go on—wash ½ tbsp down with a glass of whole milk or some whipped cream.

Soy sauce, however, is perhaps the most versatile of sauces. It does more than enhance flavor. Just soak a tarnished penny in it and see what happens. The combination of acetic acid and chloride ions dissolves the oxidized copper without touching the base metal, leaving a shiny finish.

Try that on your copper-bottom pots.

Debra A. Schwartz is a freelance writer and editor in the Washington, DC, area (debinmld@aol.com).