In cooking, a sauce is liquid, cream, or semi-solid food served on or used in preparing other foods. Sauces are not normally consumed by themselves; they add flavor, moisture, and visual appeal to another dish. Sauce is a French word taken from the Latin salsa, meaning salted. Possibly the oldest sauce recorded is garum, the fish sauce used by the Ancient Greeks.

Standard Architecture for Universal Comment Extensions or SAUCE, as it is most commonly known, is an open metadata protocol for tagging and describing ASCII text files and other files, most of which generally center on or date back to the era of BBSing. SAUCE is very similar in nature to the MP3 ID3 tag format created in 1996 in that it carries metadata such as the title, author (artist), organization (group), as well as specific hierarchical datatype information depending on what type of file it is describing.