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Sauce

Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made from soup vegetables, butter, milk, stock, and a roux, seasoned with nutmeg, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the soup vegetables and combine with cloves and nutmeg.

  2. Cook the vegetables in butter without browning them.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk with salt and sugar.

  2. Add the cooked vegetables to the boiling milk, cover, and set aside.

  3. Make a roux by cooking butter and flour slowly without browning.

  4. Gradually add the veal and chicken stock to the roux.

  5. Skim off the fat and strain the mixture through a fine strainer.

  6. Let it cool, stirring frequently to keep it smooth, and store in a cool place.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter as a roux.
Butter
Carries the vegetable flavour and forms the roux that thickens the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and gives it body and creaminess.
Veal and chicken stock
Adds savoury depth and liquid to the roux, building the sauce's flavour.

The step that matters

Make the roux without browning. Cooking butter and flour slowly keeps the roux pale and lets the starch swell evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly without a toasted taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, clove, nutmeg, butter, milk, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, clove, nutmeg, butter, milk, sugar. 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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