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Bechamel Sauce
1 1/2 cups White Stock 6 peppercorns 1 slice onion 1/4 cup butter 1 slice carrot 1/4 cup flour Bit of bay leaf 1 cup scalded milk Sprig of parsley 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cook stock twenty minutes with onion, carrot, bay leaf, parsley, and peppercorns, then strain; there should be one cupful. Melt the butter, add flour, and gradually hot stock and milk. Season with salt and pepper.
A classic velouté-béchamel hybrid: half white stock, half milk, thickened with equal parts butter and flour. The recipe is sound as written and needs only unit translation and a note on reduction.
- White stockAn unsalted, unbrowned stock from veal or chicken bones with no tomato or dark aromatics. A light chicken stock, preferably low-sodium, stands in directly; avoid anything deeply roasted, as the colour and flavour will dominate.
- Reduce to one cupThe 1 1/2 cups of stock is simmered with the vegetables for twenty minutes and must strain out at one cup. If it comes up short, top up with water; if long, keep reducing. The ratio of one cup stock to one cup milk to 1/4 cup each butter and flour is what sets the finished body.
- Cook the roux brieflyMelt the butter, stir in the flour, and let it bubble a minute or two without colouring. This cooks out the raw flour taste while keeping the sauce white.
- Add liquid hot, and graduallyBoth stock and milk should be hot when they go in, added a little at a time with constant whisking. Scalded milk means heated to just below the boil, until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim.
- Simmer to finishAfter the liquid is in, keep the sauce at a bare simmer for five to ten minutes, stirring. At 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of liquid this is a medium-bodied sauce, right for coating fish, poultry or vegetables; thin with additional hot milk if you want it pourable.
- Strain if neededIf any lumps form, pass the finished sauce through a fine sieve before seasoning. Salt at the end, since the stock's own salt content varies.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to sauce four to six portions. It holds an hour over hot water with a butter-rubbed surface or a round of parchment to prevent skinning.
Béchamel is generally traced to the court kitchens of seventeenth-century France and named for Louis de Béchameil, a steward of Louis XIV, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the cooks who actually developed it are unrecorded. In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the sauce arrives by way of the Boston Cooking School tradition, where the whole family of white sauces was taught as a set of fixed proportions to be memorised: so much butter, so much flour, so much liquid, varied by whether that liquid was milk, stock or both. This version, with stock and milk in equal parts, sits between a plain white sauce and a velouté.