Béchamel Sauce

The apocryphal story behind béchamel sauce attributes its invention to Louis de Béchameil, the steward of Louis XIV in France. That may be, but the sauce is nothing but a white sauce and white sauce can be traced to the ancient Greeks, as we know from the description found in the Greek antiquarian Athenaeus’s (10–23 CE) work on food citing the Alexandrian writer of scurrilous verse, Sopater of Paphos (c. 300 BCE), who mentions the use of white sauce.