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Sauce

Cream Bechamel Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, herbs, broth, and cream, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cream Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a medium-sized saucepan.

  2. Add the flour, nutmeg, peppercorns, and salt; mix well.

  3. Add the sliced carrot, onion, and bouquet of herbs.

  4. Moisten with the white broth and cream.

  5. Stir the sauce over medium heat for about 30 minutes.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve into a basin.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavor while forming the base roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling with the butter and liquid to form a smooth, body-giving roux.
White broth
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as the starch cooks.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce over medium heat for about 30 minutes. Gentle, steady heat and constant stirring keep the flour starch from settling and scorching on the pan base, while the starch fully cooks so the sauce thickens smoothly without a raw flour taste.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, nutmeg, carrot, parsley, thyme, 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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