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Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made from butter, flour, and milk or cream, flavored with shallots, parsley, onions, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Bechamel Sauce

Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped shallots, parsley, and onions; sauté until softened.

  3. Moisten the mixture with cream or milk and bring to a boil.

  4. Reduce the heat and simmer until the mixture is reduced by half.

  5. Season with salt and pass through a fine sieve into another saucepan.

  6. Stir in nutmeg and flour until smooth.

  7. Heat gently until the sauce is smooth and 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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Shallot + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melted fat that carries the aromatics and gives the sauce a rich flavour.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Cream or milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and gives it body and richness.
Shallots
Softened aromatics that add a mild savoury sweetness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until smooth. Flour clumps if added to liquid too quickly or unevenly. Stirring it in well before reheating helps it disperse and thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, parsley, butter, cream, nutmeg, flour. 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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