Béchamel sauce


Béchamel sauce is one of the mother sauces of French cuisine, made from a white roux and cream or milk, seasoned with ground nutmeg.

Origin

The first recipe of a sauce similar to béchamel is in the book Le cuisinier françois by François Pierre de La Varenne in 1651, made with a roux, as in modern recipes.
The first named béchamel sauce appears in The Modern Cook, written by Vincent La Chapelle and published in 1733, in which the following recipe for "Turbots " appears:
The sauce is thought to be named after Louis de Béchameil, a financier who held the honorary post of chief steward to King Louis XIV of France in the 17th century.

Adaptations

There are many legends regarding the origin of béchamel sauce. For example, it is widely repeated in Italy that the sauce was created in Tuscany under the name "salsa colla" and brought to France with Catherine de Medici, but this is an invented story, and archival research has shown that "in the list of service people who had dealt with Catherine de Medici, since her arrival in France and until her death, there were absolutely no Italian chefs." Both the béchamel recipe and its name have been adopted, even adapted, in many languages and culinary traditions.
Béchamel is referred to as:
  • white sauce in the U.S.,
  • besciamella or balsamella in Italy,
  • μπεσαμέλ in Greece,
  • بشمل in Egypt,
  • :he:רוטב בשאמל in Israel,
  • بشامل in Persia,
  • бешамель in Russia, and
  • beszamel in Poland
These adaptations have also caused various erroneous claims for the recipe's origin.

Variants

Béchamel can be used as the base for many other sauces, such as Mornay, which is béchamel with cheese. In Greek cuisine, béchamel is often enriched with egg.

Uses

Béchamel is used in dishes such as the Italian lasagne al forno and canelons, a Catalan version of Italian cannelloni. It was introduced to Greek cuisine by the chef Nikolaos Tselementes in the 1930s,
notably in moussaka and pastitsio. The Karelian-Finnish sipatti is smoked, cubed and sauteed pork belly in white sauce base, and kananmunakastike is boiled and sliced eggs in a white sauce base. These are typically eaten as main dishes with potatoes.
In Egypt, béchamel is an important and basic sauce used in many dishes, such as Egyptian macarona bil-bechamel, a comfort food recipe popular in Egypt made from penne pasta and a minced meat sauce baked with béchamel.