White Sauces for Fish, Meat, and Vegetables

For centuries, the two basic white sauces have been béchamel, made differently over the centuries but now basically milk thickened with flour, and velouté, which is essentially white broth thickened with flour. In the 1970s, when nouvelle cuisine hit France, flour became taboo in sauces in most fine restaurants. The broth was sometimes thickened by being heavily reduced—occasionally to a glaze—and then finished with egg yolks, cream, and/or butter and whatever ingredients gave the sauce its identity. Another approach, still popular today, is to reduce the broth less, finish it with a modest amount of cream, butter, or egg yolks—the amounts of these used in the 1970s were prodigious—and serve it as a rich, flavorful broth that surrounds the food, rather than coats it. It is also possible to compromise and thicken a broth lightly with flour or other starch, such as cornstarch, rice flour, arrowroot, or potato flour, and a small amount of the rich ingredient.