béchamel

Louis de Béchameil, Marquis de Nointel (1630-1703), was a financier, art collector, and maître d'hôtel to Louis XIV. The sauce that bears his name — a white sauce made from butter, flour, and milk — was probably a refinement of older cream sauces that already existed in French cooking. The Duke of Escars reportedly complained: 'That fellow Béchameil! I had been making this sauce for twenty years, and he gets his name on it just because he served it to the king.'

Whether Béchameil invented, refined, or merely promoted the sauce, his name stuck. By the eighteenth century, sauce béchamel was standard in French cuisine. Antonin Carême (1784-1833) classified it as one of the four mother sauces of French cooking. Auguste Escoffier later expanded the system to five mother sauces: béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and tomato. Béchamel is the first most students learn.

The sauce is nothing more than a roux (butter and flour cooked together) with hot milk whisked in gradually. The technique takes five minutes. The result is a blank canvas: add cheese and it becomes Mornay. Add mustard and it becomes mustard sauce. Layer it with pasta and meat and it becomes lasagna's binding element. Béchamel is the most versatile of the mother sauces because it has the least flavor of its own.

The sauce crossed from France to Italy as besciamella, where it became essential to lasagna bolognese. British cooking uses it as white sauce. Greek cooking uses it in moussaka. Each cuisine absorbed the technique without necessarily keeping the name. A seventeenth-century tax collector's name is whisked into dishes across three continents.