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Sauce

Bechamel or French White Sauce

A creamy sauce made with veal, bacon, rice flour, stock or milk, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Bechamel or French White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt butter in a deep saucepan.

  2. Add veal and bacon; cook gently until meat whitens, not browns.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix rice flour with water until smooth; add to the saucepan.

  2. Pour in the stock or water/milk; stir well.

  3. Season with peppercorns, onion, parsley, lemon-thyme, and lemon peel.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  2. Strain the sauce and stir in hot cream.

  3. Bring to a boil and strain again.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the meaty flavour and body that the sauce is built on.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the stock as it cooks.
Rice flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells with heat.
Veal stock or water/milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the flavourings infuse.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the rice flour with water until smooth before adding it. Dry or poorly mixed flour forms lumps that stay hard in the hot liquid. Dispersing the starch in water first lets each granule swell evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, rice, flour, parsley, lemon, thyme):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, rice, flour, parsley, lemon, 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.

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