Béchamel sauce

Béchamel is a thick white sauce from French cuisine, made from a roux of butter and flour loosened with milk or cream and seasoned with nutmeg. It is one of the mother sauces of French cooking, since many other sauces are built on it.

History

A popular story holds that the sauce was created in Florence and reached France with Catherine de' Medici when she married Henry II in 1533. Archival research has found no evidence for this: there were no Italian chefs among her household in France.

The earliest known recipe for a similar sauce appears in Le Cuisinier Français, published in 1651 by François Pierre de La Varenne, though it differed from today's version and was not yet called béchamel. The name first appears in The Modern Cook by Vincent La Chapelle in 1733. It is traditionally linked to Louis de Béchameil, a court official under Louis XIV, although that attribution is not firmly documented.

Over the following centuries the sauce spread across Europe and beyond, adapting to local tastes. From the eighteenth century it served as the base of Mornay sauce, enriched with cheese. In Greece, the chef Nikolaos Tselementes introduced it in the 1930s into dishes such as moussaka and pastitsio, and in Egypt it is a staple of macarona bil-bechamel.

Culture

Béchamel is now a familiar sauce in home and professional kitchens. It is used to gratin pasta and vegetables, to bind croquettes and cannelloni fillings, and to give body to creamy vegetable and mushroom soups. Cooks also use it to thicken the cooking juices of stews and roasts.

Many variants exist. Mornay adds cheese, Villeroy is used for coatings such as chicken Villeroy, and Thermidor, with mustard and white wine, is used with fish and shellfish in lobster Thermidor. In southern Europe olive oil is often used instead of butter, and in Latin America maize flour sometimes appears. Soy-milk versions suit vegans and people who are lactose intolerant, while cornstarch versions suit people who avoid gluten.

In some regions it has a particular role. In Zaragoza and La Rioja, Christmas menus traditionally include boiled cardoons served with it. In Karelia and Finland, dishes such as sipatti, cubed smoked pork belly in white sauce, are typical.