Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › BECHAMEL SAUCE (Melt two tablespoonfuls)
BECHAMEL SAUCE (Melt two tablespoonfuls)
Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, add two tablespoonfuls of flour, one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper and half a cup, each, of chicken stock and cream; add the beaten yolk of one egg and let stand over hot water five minutes. Or,
A small-batch enriched white sauce built in a chafing dish, thickened first with roux and then finished with egg yolk. The whole thing comes to about one cup.
- The hinge is the yolkOnce the beaten yolk goes in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle into scrambled threads. The instruction to "let stand over hot water five minutes" is the chafing dish's water pan doing the work of a double boiler; keep the sauce below about 180F.
- Temper before addingStir a spoonful or two of the hot sauce into the beaten yolk first, then return the mixture to the pan. The original does not say to do this, but it guards against the yolk setting in threads.
- Cook the roux firstButter and flour want a minute or two of bubbling together before liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. Keep it pale — no colour at all — since this is a white sauce.
- Chicken stockStock at this date was usually homemade and gelatinous, and often less salty than modern commercial broth, though seasoning practice varied. Boxed broth is already salted, so hold back the quarter-teaspoon of salt until you have tasted the finished sauce.
- Cream'Cream' in American books of this period generally meant something lighter than modern heavy whipping cream, closer to today's light cream or half-and-half, though butterfat varied considerably. Heavy cream works but gives a noticeably thicker, richer sauce.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to one cup of liquid is the standard medium white sauce, a coating rather than a pourable one, and the yolk and cream thicken it further — right for creamed chicken, sweetbreads or eggs on toast. Thin it with a little more warm stock if you want something pourable.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce two generous servings. The "Or," at the end is the book running straight into an alternate version on the following line.
Béchamel is generally traced to the kitchens of seventeenth-century France and named for Louis de Béchameil, a steward of Louis XIV's household, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the sauce almost certainly predates him. By the nineteenth century Carême had grouped it among his leading sauces, the later four- or five-part "mother sauce" scheme being a subsequent codification, and strictly speaking a béchamel is milk-based while a stock-based white sauce is a velouté — American cookbooks of this period used the grander French name loosely for both.