Skip to main content
Main

Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, onion, ham, celery, mushrooms, carrot, herbs, cloves, allspice, velouté, cream, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Bechamel Sauce

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 ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter over low heat in a saucepan and gently stew the onion until very tender but not browned.

  2. Add the diced ham, celery, mushrooms, carrot, sweet herbs, cloves, and allspice.

  3. Stew gently for 10 minutes without browning.

  4. Pour off any excess butter that has not been absorbed.

Finish the sauce

  1. Stir in the Velouté Sauce.

  2. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly for 5 to 10 minutes.

  3. Gradually add the cream, ensuring it is rich and not heated.

  4. Blend until the sauce is smooth and velvety.

  5. Strain the sauce.

  6. Serve immediately with fish, chicken, or sweetbreads.

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. 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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the flavours of the vegetables and ham and gives the sauce richness.
Velouté sauce
Provides the base body and thickness that the sauce is built on.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished sauce.
Onion
Softens into a sweet, savoury base that flavours the sauce.
Raw ham
Adds savoury, meaty flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the cream without overheating it. Cream that is boiled or heated too hard can split or turn grainy, and adding it slowly keeps the sauce smooth and rich.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, butter, celery, mushroom, carrot, parsley, thyme):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, celery, mushroom, carrot, parsley, thyme. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipes