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Bechamel Sauce
Take one tablespoon of flour, and one tablespoon of butter. Put them into a saucepan and stir with a wooden spoon until they have become a golden-brown color. Then add, a little at a time, one pint of milk; stir constantly until the sauce is as thick as custard, and is white in color. If it grows too thick, a little more milk may be added; or if it is too thin, a tiny lump of butter rolled in flour will thicken it.
Now take the cold Indian meal and cut it into squares about two inches across. Take a baking-dish of medium depth, butter well, then put in a layer of squares of Indian meal close together, to entirely cover the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle over it grated cheese; then pour on the top enough meat sauce to cover the layer (about two tablespoons), then on the top of this add a layer of Bechamel sauce. Then put another layer of the squares of Indian meal, sprinkle with grated cheese as before, add meat sauce, then Bechamel sauce, and continue in this way until the baking-dish is full, having for the top layer the Bechamel sauce. Put the dish into a moderate oven, and bake until it is a golden brown on top.
Despite the title, this is really a layered polenta bake: the béchamel is only the first paragraph, and the rest assumes you have cold cooked cornmeal mush and a meat sauce already on hand from elsewhere in the book.
- The colour contradictionThe recipe says to cook the roux to golden brown, then says the finished sauce should be white. Cook the flour and butter only two or three minutes, until it foams and smells nutty but has not coloured, if you want a proper white besciamella. A genuinely brown roux gives a tan sauce that will muddy the top layer.
- ProportionsOne tablespoon each of flour and butter to a pint of milk is a very thin béchamel by modern standards. Two tablespoons of each per pint (2 cups) gives the custard thickness the recipe describes without the corrective lump of butter-and-flour it anticipates.
- Indian mealNineteenth-century American for cornmeal. The recipe assumes cold cooked cornmeal mush prepared elsewhere, set firm enough to cut into two-inch squares; poured out to something like half an inch deep it slices cleanly. A rough guide of 1 cup dry cornmeal to 4 cups well-salted water gives about enough for a medium baking dish.
- Meat sauceA component the recipe assumes you already have from elsewhere in the book; its composition is not given here. Two tablespoons per layer is a light hand, so the finished dish leans on the cheese and the sauce more than on the meat.
- CheeseUnspecified in the recipe; a dry grating cheese of the Parmesan type suits the layering. Grate it yourself rather than using pre-grated, which will not melt into the layers the same way, and use a generous fistful per layer.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Thirty to forty minutes will heat the assembly through and brown the top; if the surface is pale at that point, five minutes under the broiler finishes it.
- YieldNo quantities are given, so this depends entirely on the dish; a medium baking dish built this way will serve roughly four to six. It cuts far better after resting ten minutes out of the oven.
This looks like a version of polenta pasticciata, the northern Italian habit of turning yesterday's cold cornmeal into something new by layering it with sauce and cheese and baking it. Maize came to Europe from the Americas, and by the eighteenth century polenta was a staple starch of the Veneto and Lombardy. Calling cornmeal "Indian meal" places the recipe in an English-speaking, most likely American, household, where the word polenta could not be assumed to mean much to the reader.