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Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made from butter, flour, veal stock, cream, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute without browning.

  3. Add the veal stock, boiling cream, and nutmeg; stir well.

  4. Simmer for a few minutes, then strain the sauce to remove solids.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the strained sauce to the heat and reduce by one-third.

  2. Stir in the cream and serve.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Nutmeg + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  5. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries flavour and adds richness, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks in the melted butter to form a roux.
Veal stock
Provides the savoury liquid base and body of the sauce.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour without browning. Cooking the flour in the butter for a minute removes its raw taste and lets it thicken well. Browning changes the colour and flavour of a white sauce, so keep the roux pale.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, veal, cream, nutmeg, turnip, carrot. 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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