Skip to main content
Main

Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, milk, and aromatics, seasoned with cayenne, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the milk

  1. In a small clean pan, combine the milk, parsley, thyme, turnip, and celery.

  2. Simmer gently to infuse the flavors into the milk.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter over low heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute to form a roux.

  3. Gradually whisk in the flavored milk until smooth.

  4. Cook until the sauce thickens, then season with cayenne, salt, and lemon juice.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps form the roux base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter into a roux.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, infused with the aromatics.

The step that matters

Adding the flavored milk to the roux. Adding liquid gradually while whisking keeps the starch dispersed, so the sauce becomes smooth instead of lumpy. Cooking until it thickens fully activates the flour's thickening power.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, parsley, thyme, celery, 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.

More béchamel sauce recipes

Light 7Lean 3 See all 88 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipes