Béchamel Sauce
1/2 cup hot thin cream.
Yolk 2 eggs. 1½ cups highly seasoned chicken Salt, pepper, few grains nutmeg. stock.
PROCESS: Melt butter in a saucepan, add flour, stir to a smooth paste; add stock slowly, stirring constantly; add cream and continue stirring. Bring to boiling point, remove from range and add egg yolk slightly beaten. Add seasonings. Beat until smooth and glossy. Keep hot over hot water. Do not allow sauce to boil after adding yolk of egg.
A classic velouté-style béchamel — chicken stock rather than milk, enriched with cream and egg yolk. The ingredient list as printed has come through garbled, so read the process carefully before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe printed list omits the butter and flour called for in the method. For 2 cups of combined liquid, 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour give a proper coating sauce; 3 of each if you want it thick enough to bind a filling. Any figure here is a reconstruction, not the book's.
- The hingeOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil, exactly as the last line says. Yolks begin to set from around 150F and will curdle into grains if the sauce is allowed to boil; pull the pan from the heat before adding them and finish off-heat.
- Temper the yolksBeat a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the beaten yolks before returning the mixture to the pan. The book's direct addition works if you are quick, but tempering removes the risk entirely.
- "Hot thin cream"Thin cream is roughly what we now call light cream, around 18-20 percent fat. Warming it before it meets the roux keeps the sauce from seizing; whole milk substitutes acceptably.
- Highly seasoned stockThe sauce carries almost no seasoning of its own beyond salt, pepper and nutmeg, so the stock does the work. Use a well-reduced chicken stock; a weak one gives a pasty sauce, and the final seasoning can only do so much to correct it.
- Cook the rouxStir the butter and flour together over moderate heat for two or three minutes before adding liquid — long enough to lose the raw-flour taste but not to colour. A blond roux is what this sauce wants.
- Holding itOver hot water, not over direct heat, and cover the surface or lay a butter wrapper on it to stop a skin forming. Held too long, a yolk-thickened sauce begins to thin.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough to sauce chicken or sweetbreads for six, or to bind the filling for a batch of croquettes.
Béchamel is generally traced to the kitchens of Louis XIV and named for Louis de Béchameil, his maître d'hôtel, though the attribution is traditional and the sauce almost certainly predates him. What appears here is not the plain milk-and-flour béchamel of modern usage but the older, looser sense of the word: a white sauce built on stock, enriched with cream and yolks, closer to what Escoffier's system would file under velouté or sauce allemande.