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Béchamel Sauce (Cheaper White Sauce)
(A cheaper White Sauce.) Ingredients.
One pint of Milk.
One small Carrot.
One gill of Cream.
One stick of Celery.
This entry survives only as a partial ingredient list, so it needs reading against standard practice rather than followed line by line.
- The list is incompleteA béchamel needs butter and flour in roughly equal weight to thicken it, and none is given here. For a pint of milk, reckon on about 1 oz each of butter and flour for a pouring sauce, 1.5 oz each for a coating sauce.
- What a gill means hereIn a British book a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, not the 4 fl oz US gill. Half a cup is close enough for a sauce of this kind.
- Why the carrot and celery are thereThey are infusion aromatics, not sauce ingredients. Warm them in the milk until it just steams, hold off the heat for fifteen to twenty minutes, then strain before the milk goes near the roux. Many Victorian recipes add onion, a blade of mace and a few peppercorns to the same infusion.
- "Cheaper" means no stock"Cheaper" probably means no stock -- Richer béchamels of the period were often built on veal or chicken stock as well as milk. This version appears to economise by leaning on milk and a little cream, which would leave the vegetable infusion to do the flavouring work; do not skip it.
- The hingeAdd the strained milk to the cooked roux gradually and keep it moving, and let the finished sauce cook out for at least eight to ten minutes over low heat. A short-cooked white sauce tastes of raw flour, which cream will not disguise.
- The cream goes in lastStir it in off the boil at the end, for gloss and richness. Boiled hard after the cream is in, the sauce can catch and thin.
- YieldAbout 1¼ pints (roughly 3 cups) finished sauce, enough to coat a dish for six to eight.
Béchamel is traditionally credited to Louis de Béchameil, a financier and steward in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is a courtly story rather than documented authorship; the sauce itself was codified in French professional kitchens long after him. By the late nineteenth century British cookery schools had absorbed it as one of the foundation sauces every pupil learned, and this version, plainer and milk-based, is marked "cheaper" for household rather than dinner-party use. The carrot and celery steeped in the milk suggest a taught, systematic approach rather than a domestic white sauce — the flavour seems meant to come from the infusion, since the economy has removed the stock that would otherwise have carried it.