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Bechamel Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 3/4 cup white stock 1/2 cup cream 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper In making, follow the directions given in White Sauce No. 1, with the exception of the cream, which is added at the last.
A standard roux-based sauce written in shorthand, on the assumption you have already read the white sauce entry a few pages earlier. Once you know what that entry said, the rest is straightforward.
- The missing methodWhite Sauce No. 1 would have given the standard sequence: melt the butter, stir in the flour, then add the liquid gradually, stirring, and cook until it thickens and boils. Here the stock goes in that way and the cream only at the end.
- Why the cream is held backThis is the hinge. Cream added at the start and boiled hard with the roux can break or take on a scorched taste; stirred in at the finish it thickens the sauce slightly and stays sweet. Warm it first and heat the sauce through without a rolling boil after it goes in.
- White stockVeal or chicken bones simmered without browning, so the sauce stays pale. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which turns the sauce beige.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 1/4 cups liquid is a little lighter than the usual medium proportion of two tablespoons flour per cup, though the cream adds body. If it is to be baked over fish or bound with breadcrumbs, cook it a little longer to tighten it.
- FlourGold Medal is the brand associated with the book itself. Any all-purpose flour behaves the same here.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt is light if the stock and butter are already salted, so taste at the end. Nutmeg or lemon are common finishes for a white sauce, though neither is written down here.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups, enough to sauce four servings of poached or baked fish, or to bind a filling for croquettes and patty shells.
Béchamel is one of the small group of "mother sauces" codified in nineteenth-century French practice and inherited wholesale by American cookery schools; the name is traditionally traced to Louis de Béchameil, a steward in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is a courtly compliment rather than a documented invention. What matters more for a book like this is the teaching structure: Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries taught white sauce as a single lesson in proportions, then presented béchamel, velouté and cream sauce as one-line variations on it. That is exactly what happens on this page — the recipe assumes you have learned the method once and will not need it repeated.