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Sauce

Bechamel Sauce

A creamy white sauce made with flour, butter, milk, eschalot, mace, cayenne pepper, and thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the milk with the eschalot, mace, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan and stir in the flour.

  3. Strain the milk and gradually add it to the butter and flour mixture.

  4. Bring to a boil and add salt to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain through a tammy, reheat, and add the thick cream before serving.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the melted butter.
Butter
Forms the roux with the flour, giving the sauce body and a rich mouthfeel.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as the starch swells.
Thick cream
Adds richness and a silky texture when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to the roux. Adding the milk gradually while stirring keeps the flour smoothly dispersed. Adding it all at once can leave lumps, because flour starch clumps when it hits liquid before it can disperse.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, milk, cream, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, cream, pepper. 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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