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Bechamel, or French White Sauce
Cut an onion and a carrot into large dice, with a little celery, a few whole peppers, and some scraps of ham (not smoked), fowl, or white-fleshed game; fry lightly in four ounces of butter or good dripping. Add four ounces of dry flour, mix well together, and fry to a golden brown. Draw the saucepan from the fire and moisten with one pint of milk and one pint of good white stock, a little at a time, mixing well with a whisk. Season with pepper and salt. It should be sufficiently thick to cling to the spoon. Pass it through muslin into a basin for future use. Probable cost, 1s.
NOTE.--Bechamel is considered the foundation of most sauces used in cooking, and, being prepared in advance, it can be made with any scraps of fowl, white-fleshed game, or fish.
A Victorian working sauce made in quantity and kept on hand, rather than the milk-only béchamel of modern practice. The proportions are heavy by today's standards and one instruction contradicts what most cooks now expect.
- Do not brown the rouxDo not take the roux past the golden brown the recipe calls for. A darker roux thickens less and gives the finished sauce a nutty, beige cast that shows badly under white meat or fish.
- Whole peppersThese are whole black peppercorns. They are strained out at the end, along with the vegetables and meat scraps, so they need no crushing.
- Ham, not smokedThe point is to add savour without smoke, which would dominate a white sauce. Use a piece of unsmoked gammon, prosciutto trimmings, or simply omit it and lean on a good chicken stock.
- DrippingBeef or pork dripping was the everyday alternative to butter and will work, though it carries its own flavour. Butter gives the cleaner result for a sauce meant to go under delicate meat.
- Proportions and consistencyFour ounces of flour to two pints of liquid is a heavy sauce — around 115 g to roughly 1.1 litres (imperial pints), about double a modern coating consistency. The recipe's own gauge is that it should be "sufficiently thick to cling to the spoon"; thin with more stock if it sets stiff.
- The missing simmerNo cooking time is given, but the sauce needs 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer, stirred often, to cook the raw taste out of the flour and to draw flavour from the vegetables and meat. Rushing this is the commonest way to spoil it.
- StrainingMuslin means a doubled square of cheesecloth or a fine chinois. Press the solids firmly to extract the liquid, then discard them.
- Yield and keepingAbout a quart. It contains milk and meat stock: cool it quickly, refrigerate covered, and use within a few days rather than keeping it in a larder basin "for future use" as the book assumes.
- Probable cost, 1sA shilling was a noticeable outlay for a sauce base at the time, which fits the book's own steer toward scraps and trimmings.
Béchamel is generally traced to Louis de Béchameil, a financier and steward in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is traditional and the sauce almost certainly predates him. What is notable in this version is that it is not the plain flour-butter-milk sauce a modern cook means by the word: half the liquid is white stock, and the base is built on onion, carrot, celery, peppercorns and meat trimmings. That puts it closer to what Carême and his successors classified as velouté. The instruction to use "any scraps" is the household economy of the period showing through: a sauce base was a way of turning the carcass ends of yesterday's fowl into today's dinner.