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Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made from stock, arrowroot, and cream, thickened by simmering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Clove and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 121 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Combine cloves, bay leaf, savory herbs, mushrooms, and salt in a pot.

  2. Boil to extract flavors, then strain and boil again until reduced by half.

Thicken the cream

  1. Mix arrowroot with cream and simmer gently for 5 minutes over low heat.

  2. Add reduced stock to the cream mixture and simmer until thickened, about 10 minutes if thick, or stir over high heat until thickened if thin.

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. Clove + arrowroottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Mushroom + arrowroottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Arrowroot + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Starch that swells when heated, thickening the cream into a smooth sauce.
Cream
Provides fat and body, giving the sauce its rich, smooth texture.
Mushrooms
Add savory, earthy depth to the stock that carries into the sauce.
Cloves
Contribute a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the infused stock.
Bay leaf
Adds a subtle herbal aroma to the infused stock.

The step that matters

Thickening the cream with arrowroot. Arrowroot starch thickens when heated but loses its thickening power if boiled too hard or too long. Keeping the cream at a gentle simmer and checking its texture prevents a thin or broken sauce, and stirring helps stop the cream from scorching.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, arrowroot, cream):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, arrowroot, 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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