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Bechamel Brown Sauce
Chop some lean veal, bacon, one carrot, two small onions and one turnip. Put them into a saucepan with a small lump of butter, and fry until they are nicely browned; then dredge in a small quantity of flour, and fry that as well. Moisten the onions, etc., with some broth and one-half pint of cream; add three cloves, one bay leaf, a bunch of parsley and thyme, a small quantity of grated nutmeg, and salt and pepper. When on the point of boiling, move the sauce to the side of the fire, and allow it to stew gently for an hour. When strained, the sauce will be ready for serving.
A brown velouté-style sauce built on a mirepoix and finished with cream — closer to what most books call a sauce Allemande or a brown béchamel than the white béchamel of modern practice. The quantities are loose, so treat the vegetables and meat as roughly equal in bulk and let the cream measurement anchor the batch.
- ScaleHalf a pint of cream is 1 cup. The recipe gives no weights and only says to "moisten" with broth, so the yield is open; working back from the cream, something like 6 oz lean veal and 2 oz bacon, finely chopped, is a reasonable guess rather than a figure the text supports.
- "Move to the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant taking the pan off direct heat to a cooler spot. On a modern burner, drop to the lowest setting or use a heat diffuser so the surface barely trembles.
- Do not let it boil once the cream is inA hard boil with cream in the pan risks breaking the sauce, and the flour-thickened base can catch and scorch on the bottom. Bring it only to the point of boiling, as written, then hold it at a bare simmer.
- Brown the flour properly"Fry that as well" means cooking the dredged flour with the vegetables until it takes on real colour and smells nutty — several minutes at least. Underdone flour gives a pasty, raw-tasting sauce that no amount of stewing will fix.
- BrothVeal or light chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted; the sauce stews an hour and will concentrate. The recipe seasons before stewing, so use a light hand there and correct after straining.
- StrainingPress the solids firmly in a fine sieve or chinois to recover the liquid held in the vegetables, then discard them. If the result is thin, reduce it a few minutes; if too thick, loosen with warm broth.
- AromaticsThree cloves is assertive in 2 cups of sauce — tie them with the bay, parsley and thyme in a bundle so they can be pulled early if the clove starts to dominate. Grate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground has little to give after an hour of stewing.
- KeepingRefrigerate up to three days and rewarm gently without boiling. It will set firm when cold and loosen again with heat and a splash of stock.
Béchamel is the one French "mother" sauce to carry a courtier's name — traditionally attributed to Louis de Béchameil, a financier and steward in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is honorific rather than documented and the sauce almost certainly predates him. What is worth noticing here is that the nineteenth-century kitchen did not treat béchamel as merely milk thickened with a white roux: Carême and the cooks who followed him distinguished a lean version from a rich one built on veal and ham, and browned variants such as this one appear under the béchamel name in period books.