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Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made from milk or cream, Velouté, butter, flour, egg yolks, seasonings, and finished with cold butter.

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

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, heat the cream or milk until it begins to simmer.

  2. Add the Velouté according to the amount of Bechamel you want to make and stir until well mixed and thick like plain cream.

Make the enriched sauce

  1. In another saucepan, melt the butter and whisk in the flour.

  2. Add the egg yolks, salt, pepper, nutmeg, water, and lemon juice, mixing well.

  3. Simmer over low heat, stirring continuously until thickened.

  4. Before serving, stir in small pieces of cold butter for a smooth finish.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the mixture through a fine cloth to 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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

Cream or milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce and carries its richness and smoothness.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and flavour, and cold butter stirred in at the end gives a glossy, smooth finish.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter into a roux.
Egg yolks
Add richness and, when heated gently, help thicken and enrich the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter and yolks.

The step that matters

Simmer over low heat, stirring continuously until thickened. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the sauce gets too hot, so gentle low heat and constant stirring keep it smooth while it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

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