Home › The Principles of Cookery › WHITE BECHAMEL SAUCE (economical and good)
WHITE BECHAMEL SAUCE (economical and good)
Good bechamel may be made of the remains of a cold roast fowl. Break up the bones, and put them into a saucepan with two or three bacon-bones, a small carrot, a small onion, a very small piece of mace, two peppercorns, and a pinch of salt. Pour over the ingredients as much water as will entirely cover them, and simmer gently for two hours. Carefully remove the scum as it rises. Half an hour before the stock is taken from the fire, stir into it a tea-spoonful of gelatine which has been soaked for half an hour in two table-spoonfuls of water. Strain the stock into a bowl, and when it is cold remove the fat from the surface. Put the broth into a clean saucepan, and simmer till it is reduced to about three-quarters of a pint. Mix with it an equal quantity of boiling cream or milk, slightly thicken with arrowroot, add salt to taste, and it will be ready for use. Time, three to four hours. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the cold meat, if made with milk. Sufficient for a pint and a half of white bechamel sauce.
A frugal Victorian béchamel that is really a reduced white fowl stock bound with cream and arrowroot rather than a flour roux. The whole thing rests on getting a clear, well-skimmed stock.
- Keep it at a bare simmerClarity is the point of a white sauce. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and the finished sauce turns cloudy and greyish; hold it at the barest tremble and skim faithfully for the full two hours.
- Quantities and yieldThree-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz in imperial measure, roughly 425 ml or a scant 2 cups. With an equal volume of cream or milk you finish with about 1.5 pints (850 ml), which the book itself notes.
- Mace and peppercorns"A very small piece of mace" most likely means a fragment of blade mace rather than ground. Two peppercorns is a deliberately light hand rather than an error; the stock is strained, so the seasoning is meant to stay in the background.
- Bacon bonesFew butchers sell these now. A 50 g piece of unsmoked bacon or pancetta, or a scrap of ham hock, gives the same saltiness and body. Smoked bacon will dominate; taste before adding any salt.
- The gelatineA teaspoon of leaf or powdered gelatine bloomed in cold water compensates for a stock made from cooked, already-roasted bones, which yield little natural gelatine. If you have a well-set homemade stock you can leave it out.
- Arrowroot, not flourSlake the arrowroot in a little cold milk, add it off the boil, and cook only until it clears — about 30 seconds. Arrowroot thins and goes stringy if held at a boil or reheated hard, so make this sauce close to service.
- Salting lateSalt only after the reduction. Stock concentrated by a third or more will carry the seasoning already in it, and the bacon bones add more.
- Cold roast fowlA picked-over roast chicken carcass is exactly right. Break the bones so the marrow is exposed; a whole intact frame gives a thin stock.