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Sauce

Cream Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, peppercorns, herbs, broth, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cream Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour, peppercorns, salt, and nutmeg; knead together until smooth.

  3. Add the sliced onion and carrot, along with the bouquet of herbs.

  4. Pour in the white broth and cream, stirring well.

  5. Simmer the sauce for about 30 minutes, then strain through a sieve into a bowl.

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.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Nutmeg + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form the fat base that the flour is cooked into.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it combines with the fat and liquid.
White broth
Forms the liquid body of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Knead the flour into the butter until smooth. Cooking flour in fat before adding liquid coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly. Lumps form if the flour is not fully worked in, and they are hard to remove later.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, nutmeg, carrot, parsley, thyme, cream):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, nutmeg, carrot, parsley, thyme, 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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