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Bechamel Sauce

A creamy white sauce made from butter, flour, stock, and cream, seasoned with onion, carrot, bay leaf, parsley, salt, and pepper.

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

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infused stock

  1. Cook the white stock with onion, carrot, bay leaf, and parsley in a pot for about 15 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture to remove solids.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter over medium heat in a separate saucepan.

  2. Add the flour to the melted butter and stir until combined.

  3. Gradually add the strained stock and cream, stirring continuously until smooth.

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

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

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

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

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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 flavour, and with flour forms the roux that thickens it.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving body.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the aromatics' flavour into it.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the stock and cream to the roux. Adding liquid gradually while stirring constantly keeps the starch dispersed so lumps do not form. Adding it all at once can trap clumps of flour that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

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