Home › Sauces and Meats › Balsamella Sauce
Balsamella Sauce
(Salsa balsamella) This sauce resembles the famous French Bèchamel Sauce, but it is simpler in its composition. 1 Put in a saucepan one tablespoonful of flour and a piece of butter as big as an egg. Stir the flour and the butter together while keeping them over the fire. When the flour begins to be browned, pour over a pint of milk, continually stirring with a wooden spoon until you see the liquid condensed like a cream. This is the Balsamella.
If it is too thick add some milk, if too liquid put back on the fire with another piece of butter dipped in flour.
A good Balsamella and some well prepared brown stock are the base and the principal secret of many savory dishes. 60
A one-paragraph roux-and-milk sauce with proportions that need a second look before you start.
- Do not actually brown the flourThe text says to cook until the flour "begins to be browned", but balsamella is normally kept pale blond, cooked two or three minutes only to lose the raw taste. A genuinely browned roux thickens less and colours the sauce.
- "A piece of butter as big as an egg"Conventionally reckoned at roughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It is an approximation, and how closely any cook hit it is anyone's guess.
- The flour is badly under-measuredOne tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk will not condense into anything cream-like. A pourable balsamella wants roughly 4 tablespoons flour to 2 cups milk; the recipe's own escape clause about "another piece of butter dipped in flour" is doing the real work. Start with equal weights of butter and flour.
- PintRead as 16 fluid ounces (2 cups, about 475 ml) if the translation follows US measure, 20 ounces if imperial; the excerpt does not say which.
- Adding the milkPouring a pint of cold milk over hot roux at once invites lumps. Add it in stages off the heat, whisking smooth between additions, then return to a low flame.
- Heat and stirringKeep it at a bare simmer and keep the wooden spoon moving across the bottom of the pan. Milk sauces scorch quickly and the burnt taste cannot be stirred out.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are conventional; season after the sauce has thickened, since it reduces as it cooks.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough to bind a lasagne or gratin for four to six.
Balsamella is simply the Italian spelling of béchamel, and the recipe belongs to the world of Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891) taught educated Italian households a repertoire that borrowed freely from French technique while insisting on its own plainer version. The note that it is "simpler in its composition" than the French sauce is pointed: the Italian version is butter, flour and milk and nothing else. The French sauce is traditionally credited to Louis de Béchamel in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is a courtly compliment rather than documented authorship, and Italian writers have long countered that the technique traveled north with Catherine de' Medici's cooks. The closing remark, that a good balsamella and a good brown stock underpin most savory cooking, is the standard nineteenth-century view of a kitchen organized around a few mother preparations.