Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

• an ounce of melted butter
• slicing up the onion
• a quarter of a pound of flour
• half a pint of cream
• a small tinful of mushrooms
• salt
• pepper

Method

1. 1

   Melt butter, fry sliced onion without coloring, add meat and bones, cover with water, and make a clear consomme.

2. 2

   Add sugar and vegetables.

3. 3

   Strain the broth.

4. 4

   Melt butter, fry carrot and onion, add flour, then gradually add broth, cream, mushrooms, salt, and pepper.

5. 5

   Simmer for an hour.

Nutrition per serving

As published

This recipe was extracted from Culinary jottings (1885) by A. R. Kenney-Herbert, page 55. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.

pepper, a pinch of sugar, and salt, and then slowly 9 98 CULINARY JOTTINGS FOR MADRAS. stir in half a pint of Espagnole to complete the sauce, and when thoroughly hot, it is ready. Take now Financiere sauce for, let us say, a ragout of that name : — Choose a nice tender fowl, lightly roast it, and save the choicest fillet meat for your ragout : take the legs, thighs, skin, bones, liver, giblets, scraps, and trim- mings, and proceed to make an essence of them thus : — Break up the bones, and, with the remnants aforesaid, make the strongest broth you can, flavoured with an onion, a bit of celery, a spoonful of dried herbs, a sliced carrot, and two or three pepper corns. Reduce it as strong as possible, and then strain. Now, take equal portions of mushrooms and of truffles ; cut them up, and toss them in melted butter at the bottom of a sauce-pan, and when you have worked them well thus, for two or three minutes, add your fowl- cssence, with a glass of sherry, and complete the sauce with your pint of Espagnole. The ragout (which should be garnished with whole button mushrooms, sliced truffles, cocks-combs, sweet-breads, tongue, grated ham, and sip- pets of crisply fried bacon) is merely a careful stew of fowl fillets, in the sauce I have described. As the fillets have been previously cooked, they will merely require gently heating up in the sauce. It will be observed that the specialiles of the two sauces just given are a flavour of truffles and Madeira in Perigueux, and of chicken essence with mushrooms, truffles, and sherry in Financiere. Bechamel, which I select as the best type of a funda- mental white sauce, should be made in this way : — Take the same ingTcdients that I have detailed for Espagnole, and commence by slicing up the onion, and shaking the rings in an ounce of melted butter at the bottom of the stew-pan ; do not let them take colour, but add your meat* * Veal, if procurable, instead of beef. — W. SAUCES— CONCLUDED. 99 and bones at once, and cover them with water, omitting the browning stage : go on now to make a clear consomme ; instead of burnt-sugar colouring, add a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar plain, and all the vegetables. If this be carefully prepared and skimmed, you will obtain a pellucid broth which should be strained, and kept ready for use presently. Take a sauce-pan, and melt a quarter of a pound of "cow-brand," or any good preserved butter in it ; fry gently in that for ten minutes a sliced carrot and a sliced onion ; before they take colour, add two ounces of flour, stir for five minutes, and add by degrees your clear broth, half a pint of cream, a small tinful of mushrooms

Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.