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Bechamel Sauce

A creamy mushroom sauce made with butter, flour, white stock, cream, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan and mix in the flour.

  2. Add the white stock and stir until it boils.

  3. Add the mushrooms and let the sauce boil again.

  4. Simmer for 20 minutes with the lid half on, skimming off any butter that rises.

  5. Strain the sauce through a tammy into another stew pan.

Finish and cool

  1. Stir in the cream and lemon juice, then boil for 3 to 5 minutes.

  2. Pour into a basin and stir while it cools.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Forms the fat base that is cooked with flour into a roux, adding richness and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked in the butter and then the stock, giving it body.
White stock
Provides the liquid that the roux thickens into a smooth sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour to the stock as the sauce simmers.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream and lemon juice, then boil for 3 to 5 minutes.. Once the cream is added, the sauce must be boiled only briefly. Prolonged boiling can cause dairy to separate or become grainy, and the lemon juice can curdle cream if it is not well mixed in.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mushroom, cream):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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