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Sauce

Bechamel with Meat

A creamy sauce made by simmering bacon, carrot, turnip, onions, veal, and spices in stock and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 with Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, lightly fry bacon, carrot, turnip, onions, and veal in butter.

  2. Transfer to a stewpan and add stock, flour, pepper, salt, nutmeg, cloves, thyme, parsley, and bay leaf.

  3. Stew slowly for one hour.

Finish

  1. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  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

Butter
Fat that softens the vegetables and bacon and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock as it simmers, giving the sauce body.
Bacon
Adds savoury, smoky fat and flavour to the base.
Stock
Forms the liquid of the sauce and carries the flavour of the aromatics.
Onions
Add sweetness and depth as they soften and brown lightly in the fat.

The step that matters

Stew slowly for one hour. A gentle simmer lets the flour thicken the stock smoothly and draws flavour from the vegetables and meat without scorching or reducing too fast. Boiling hard can cause lumps and a bitter, cooked taste.

Swap the onion

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

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

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