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Bechamel Sauce
Cook one and a half cups of white stock twenty minutes with one slice of onion, one slice of carrot, a bit of bay leaf, a sprig of parsley and six peppercorns, then strain. It should be cooked down to about one cup of liquor. Melt four tablespoons of butter, four tablespoons of flour, and pour over it the hot sauce with one cup of scalded milk. Season with salt and pepper.-Stella A.. Downing.
A classic velouté-style béchamel built on infused white stock as well as milk. The recipe is sound; most of what needs saying concerns quantities and the roux.
- White stockUnsalted veal or chicken stock, ideally light in color and not deeply browned. A mild, low-sodium chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; season only at the end, since reducing 1½ cups to 1 cup concentrates whatever salt is already there.
- The reduction is the pointSimmering the stock down with onion, carrot, bay, parsley and peppercorns is what separates this from a plain white sauce. Do not skip the straining — the peppercorns and bay will keep releasing flavor and turn the sauce harsh.
- Roux proportionsFour tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of liquid gives a thick coating sauce suited to masking meat or fish, or to binding croquettes. For a thinner pouring sauce, use two to three tablespoons of each.
- Cook the flourThe instruction reads as though the butter and flour are simply melted together. Let the roux bubble two to three minutes over low heat before liquid goes in, or the finished sauce will taste of raw flour.
- Add the liquid hot, off the heatBoth stock and milk should be hot. Pull the pan aside, whisk in the liquid a little at a time until smooth, then return to the heat and simmer gently for several minutes to cook out the starch.
- Scalded milkScalding meant heating milk to just below the boil; the reason usually given was to delay souring in unpasteurized milk. With modern pasteurized milk it mainly keeps the sauce from cooling and lumping, so heating it to steaming is sufficient.
- YieldAbout two cups — enough to sauce four to six portions of poached chicken, veal or white fish, or to bind a batch of croquette filling.
Béchamel is generally traced to the household of Louis XIV, where it is traditionally said to be named for Louis de Béchameil, a court financier and maître d'hôtel, though the claim that he invented it is doubted and the sauce almost certainly predates him. What is notable in this version is the stock: nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and English cooks often built béchamel on a mixture of white stock and milk, closer to what later French classification would call a velouté, and over the twentieth century the name narrowed to mean a milk-only sauce. The vegetable-and-herb infusion here uses aromatics of the sort French cooking associates with a bouquet garni and a mirepoix.