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Béchamel Sauce
1 tablespoonful of butter 1 gill of stock 1 tablespoonful of flour 1 gill of cream 2 dashes of pepper Yolk of one egg ½ teaspoonful of salt Melt the butter without browning, then add the flour, mix until smooth; add the stock and cream, stir continually until it boils; take from the fire, add the salt, pepper and the yolk of the egg well beaten.
This sauce is especially nice for sweetbreads, chickens, cutlets, and baked or boiled fish.
A small-batch white sauce enriched with cream and finished with a yolk liaison. It makes about a cup, enough for four modest servings.
- Gills and stray capital I'sA gill is half a cup in American measure, so this is 1/2 cup stock and 1/2 cup cream. The "I" that opens several lines stands for the numeral 1.
- The salt is out of scaleA teaspoon and a half of salt in one cup of sauce will read as brine to a modern palate, especially with a salted commercial stock. Start with 1/4 teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Cook the roux, then stopMelt the butter over low heat and let the flour bubble a minute or two without colour, so the finished sauce stays as pale as the name promises.
- Adding the liquidWarm stock and cream go in more smoothly than cold; add in two or three stages, whisking each addition to a paste before the next. It should just reach a boil and thicken, no longer than a minute at the simmer.
- The yolk is the hingeOff the heat, whisk a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the beaten yolk first, then return the mixture to the pan. Tipping a raw yolk into a nearly boiling sauce scrambles it into threads that no straining will fully fix.
- Yolk and food safetyThe yolk goes into a sauce that has only just come off the boil, which is hot enough to cook it, but the sauce should not be held warm for long or reheated to a boil afterwards. If you are cooking for anyone vulnerable, use a pasteurised yolk.
- ServingNapping consistency, coating the back of a spoon. Use it at once; a yolk-finished sauce breaks and skins on standing, and cannot be brought back with heat.
- Note on the nameThis is a béchamel only in the older, looser sense. A modern béchamel is milk-based with no stock and no yolk; what is described here is closer to what French kitchens call a sauce allemande.
Sauce b he household of Louis XIV's steward Louis de B traditional rather than documented and cooks were thickening milk with roux long before he was named. By the late nineteenth century "b" in English and American books had drifted well away from Car s classification and often meant, as here, any pale rich sauce built on a white roux, with stock, cream and an egg yolk all admitted.