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Béchamel Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1/2 cup white stock 1/2 cup cream 1/4 teaspoon salt Dash of pepper Melt the butter; cook thoroughly with the flour; add the stock gradually, then the cream and seasoning.
A small-batch white sauce built on stock rather than all milk, which is what distinguishes béchamel in this older sense from a plain cream sauce. The proportions give about one cup.
- White stockMeans an unbrowned veal or chicken stock — bones blanched, not roasted, so the liquid stays pale. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; a browned beef stock will tint the sauce and change its flavor entirely.
- The roux is the hinge"Cook thoroughly with the flour" means two to three minutes over moderate heat until the mixture smells faintly of biscuit but has taken no color. Undercooked, it tastes of raw flour; browned, it is no longer a white sauce.
- Adding the liquidWarm the stock first and add it in stages, whisking each addition smooth before the next. Adding liquid too fast, or without whisking it smooth, is the common cause of lumps.
- CreamCream in recipes of this period was often thinner than today's heavy cream, closer to light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream works but gives a noticeably richer, thicker sauce.
- ConsistencyRoughly 1.5 tablespoons flour to one cup liquid is a thin-to-medium sauce, meant for coating vegetables, fish, or croquette mixtures. Simmer another minute or two after the cream goes in to lose any starchy edge; thin with a spoonful of stock if it tightens too far.
- Yield and holdingAbout one cup, enough for four servings as a coating sauce. If it must wait, press plastic wrap or a butter paper onto the surface to keep a skin from forming.
Béchamel is generally traced to the kitchens of seventeenth-century France and named for Louis de Béchameil, a steward in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is traditional and the sauce almost certainly predates him. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and English cookbooks, béchamel was often given as this stock-and-cream version — a step up in richness and trouble from plain white sauce made with milk — though period books vary, several calling for milk or a milk-and-stock mixture; in either case it sat in the sauce chapter as a base to be flavored onward into cheese, mustard, or oyster sauces. Its appearance in a loose-leaf teaching book like Mrs. Fryer's reflects how domestic-science courses of the period taught sauces as a graded series: master the roux and one liquid, then vary the liquid. Only later, largely through Escoffier's codification, did the milk-based version become the standard reading of the name.