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Sauce

How to Prepare Bechamel-sauce

A creamy sauce made from butter, flour, milk, ham, onions, parsley, bay leaf, peppercorns, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

How to Prepare Bechamel-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and diced ham; fry for 10 minutes on medium heat, stirring constantly.

  3. Remove from heat and gradually mix in warm milk until smooth.

Infuse and strain

  1. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and add parsley, bay leaf, peppercorns, and onions.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes, then strain through a sieve into another saucepan.

Finish the sauce

  1. Reduce on high heat, stirring, and gradually add spoonfuls of cream until the sauce is creamy and flavorful.

  2. Remove from heat.

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. 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. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and carries flavour from the aromatics.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, stable sauce as the starch gelatinises.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.
Raw cream
Adds richness and a silkier texture as the sauce reduces.
Onions
Release sweetness and aroma into the sauce during simmering.

The step that matters

Adding the warm milk to the roux. Adding milk gradually and off the heat while stirring lets the starch disperse evenly, preventing lumps. Adding it all at once or to a hot roux makes lumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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