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Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made from butter, flour, stock, milk, and optional egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour, peppercorns, mace, onion, carrot, bay leaf, parsley, and hot stock.

  3. Simmer for 20 minutes, then strain the mixture.

  4. Stir in the milk or cream.

  5. If a yellow sauce is desired, add the beaten yolks of 2 eggs.

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

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

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while the flour cooks into a roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling with the hot liquid as it cooks.
Milk or cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the finished sauce.
Egg yolks
Add richness and a yellow colour, and thicken the sauce gently when heated.

The step that matters

Stir in the milk or cream. Adding cold dairy to a hot roux-thickened liquid can make it lumpy or thin, so it should be stirred in steadily and the sauce kept from boiling hard.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, onion, carrot, parsley, milk, egg):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, onion, carrot, parsley, milk, egg. 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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