Bechamel Sauce
1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 cup thin cream 1/2 cup white stock-chicken or veal salt pepper Melt the butter in smooth saucepan; stir in the flour; cook and stir until frothy; then draw to a cooler part of stove, add seasoning and stir while adding the liquid. Cook until thick, stirring until smooth. Egg Sauce (For Fish) 1 cup white sauce 2 chopped hard-boiled eggs 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon lemon juice or vinegar Add eggs and parsley and lemon juice to white sauce after removing from fire.
A standard small-batch béchamel — a one-tablespoon roux to a cup of liquid, which is a thin pouring sauce rather than a coating one — followed by a variation for fish.
- The hinge: cook the roux, don't colour it"Cook and stir until frothy" means letting the butter and flour bubble together for a minute or two to lose the raw starch taste while staying pale. Once it takes on colour it is no longer a white sauce.
- "Draw to a cooler part of the stove"Written for a wood or coal range, where you moved the pan rather than turned a dial. On a modern hob, take the pan off the heat or drop to low before the liquid goes in.
- Thin creamPeriod "thin cream" meant an unwhipped, lower-fat cream, somewhere between today's half-and-half and light cream; the fat content was not standardised. Whole milk works and gives a lighter sauce; heavy cream will make it noticeably richer than intended.
- White stockAn unbrowned chicken or veal stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; season at the end, since the original's blanket "salt pepper" assumes an unsalted homemade stock.
- Adding the liquidWarming the cream and stock first, and adding in stages with constant stirring, prevents lumps. Cold liquid into hot roux will work too if you whisk hard.
- Consistency and timeExpect four to six minutes of gentle simmering after the liquid is in — long enough to thicken and to cook out any floury edge. It should coat a spoon thinly, not mound on it.
- Egg sauceThe "1 cup white sauce" is this béchamel, or a plain milk version. Fold the eggs in off the heat as directed; the acid and the chopped whites both suffer from further boiling, and the sauce can split.
- YieldThe béchamel makes enough to sauce two to four servings. The egg sauce, with the eggs and parsley folded in, makes appreciably more.
Béchamel is one of the sauces French codification eventually placed among the mother sauces, and it is generally traced by name to Louis de Béchamel, a steward in the household of Louis XIV -- a traditional attribution rather than a documented invention. What is striking in an American cookbook of this period is how thoroughly the sauce had been domesticated: no French phrasing, no reduction of stock, just butter, flour and a measured cup of liquid, serving as the base from which egg sauce and other household variations were spun.