Using Béchamel Sauce

If you follow most recipes for béchamel you’ll end up with something very bland (not necessarily a bad thing, but a situation that is easily improved). Modern béchamel is made by adding milk to a simple roux, and at most flavoring it with a little nutmeg and cayenne. This wasn’t always the case. Escoffier’s recipe, now about 100 years old, contains onion, along with cubes of veal and a sprig of thyme, sweated in butter before the flour and milk are added. Some 70 years before Escoffier, Carême gives a recipe for béchamel made by adding a ham-enriched concentrated veal broth to a roux—producing what’s now called a sauce velouté—and then converting the velouté into béchamel by adding heavy cream. The resulting sauce is actually closer to what was later called a sauce suprême. About 80 years before Carême, Menon, in his Les Soupers de la Cour (1755), gives a recipe in which slices of raw ham, mushrooms, shallots, garlic, cloves, bay leaves, and basil are gently cooked in butter until colored (before the nineteenth century, béchamel sauce wasn’t a white sauce as it is today), flour is sprinkled over all, and the mixture moistened with cream. I’m not suggesting you go out and buy 10 pounds [4.5 kg] of veal to improve your béchamel sauce, but a few veal trimmings or bits of prosciutto end will work wonders. Here’s my own béchamel. If you don’t have some of the ingredients, leave them out—your sauce will still be a lot better than the standard version. If you’re in a mad rush, just make a roux with the butter and flour, skip the vegetables and prosciutto, and simmer, skim, and season as described on the following page.