Instructions: In the same way Billy Joel is dabbling in classical music these days, contemporary chefs are taking new cues from that old guy, Escoffier.

Until recently, sauce was the accouterment that dared not speak its name. If a chef listed any accompaniment to his halibut or rib-eye, it was likely to be something as nebulous as a jus or a foam or a coulis. More often, the menu implied that entrees came naked into this world.

But more and more chefs are putting away their carrot juicers and getting out their copper pots to reduce red wine with shallots for bordelaise sauce. Theyre whisking clarified butter into eggs with tarragon to make bearnaise. And theyre listing these traditional sauces on their menus.

In some cases, the movement is a way of reclaiming control from a generation of diners who insisted on sauce on the side. In others, its a way of catering to diners searching out the familiar. Regardless of the reasons, chefs are acknowledging that the mother sauces codified by Careme dominated cooking for centuries for a reason.

Brian Young of New Yorks Citarella, who had classical training in France and also cooked at Le Bernardin, sums up the situation when he compares the sauce recipes in the most recent Joy of Cooking with those in the original: The new one has red curry-carrot emulsion. The old one has bearnaise. And the old one was better for basic culinary information.

Old French kitchens never abandoned the Escoffier classics. But young chefs, out to make their names as the next Emeril, seemed inevitably to strike out for untried territory and latch on to notions like marmalades and broths and compotes. Part of it is due to the conceit that supremely fresh, organically raised produce, meat and fish need no sauce at all.

But even Alice Waters did not abandon bechamel. The word sauce, after all, comes from the Latin word for salt, which is just one indication of how essential the concept is.

At the Culinary Institute of America, students are taught five mother sauces: bechamel, hollandaise, demiglace, veloute and tomato, said Stephen Johnson, a lecturer and chef-instructor at the school, in Hyde Park, N.Y.

We teach those in the first class where they actually use their knives, Johnson said.

Students also are taught what he calls contemporary sauces: mayonnaises, vinaigrettes and compotes. And they get serious training in making stocks, which are the foundation of most great sauces and which separate professional chefs from home cooks.

Now that sauces are seeping back, some chefs are adhering to the rules laid out centuries ago, while others are modernizing the classics in subtle ways.

Some of their concepts are beyond the reach of the average home cook, but others are as accessible as blender hollandaise.

Sauce gribiche - a tangy blend of sieved eggs suspended in vinaigrette with capers, cornichons and herbs - is one of the oldest sauces in the book, a sort of modern tartar. For years it had fallen off the culinary map, but in April I had it at Fifth Floor in San Francisco, then again at Ilo in New York in the fall.

Chef Daniel Boulud, who says a lot of my inspirations are squeezed out of the classics, is reinterpreting bordelaise as a sauce for roasted tuna, rather than for the usual cote de boeuf at Daniel in New York. The sauce is 75 percent classic meat bordelaise and 25 percent red wine fish sauce.

Young chefs have the hardest time adjusting to learn to do more than roast fish and serve it with a pan glaze, Boulud said. It takes more than a flash in the pan. . . . A lot of them dont know the classics. They can find more depth of creativity when they know them. Every creative chef today has more knowledge of the classics.

Jonathan Crean at Abajour makes a one-bordelaise-fits-all from a basic streamlined recipe, eliminating the marrow and going for gutsy flavor. Crean, who also was schooled in French traditions, just calls it red wine sauce.

Straight, it goes under the pureed white beans and garlic spinach with duck confit on his menu. Infused with rosemary, it becomes a good partner for lamb and with shiitakes, it is a superb accompaniment to his grilled fillet.

Other chefs are a little looser in their terminology. Tom Valenti at Ouest serves his lightly smoked roasted salmon with what he calls a caviar remoulade.

But he acknowledges that the sauce is actually more of a mousseline. A mayonnaise base is lightened with whipped cream and flavored with minced red onion and the caviar. Remoulade is classically a little heavier and more laden with cornichons and capers.

Kerry Heffernan of Eleven Madison Park speaks for many chefs in New York when he says: Pretty much everything were doing today has been done. Those old French chefs tried everything. But not that many chefs today know the classical sauces, what the end product is and what the flavor dynamics are.

Thats why one young chef, who will remain nameless, was as proud as if he had invented the knife when he described his groundbreaking version of bearnaise. Its made, he said, not with egg yolks in butter but with hard-cooked eggs in vinaigrette. Funny, I told him, that sounds exactly like a sauce gribiche.

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