How a most versatile mother sauce made my mom’s life easier

As the middle child in my family, I it was charged with certain non-negotiable household chores. The most significant was cooking dinner for my siblings when Mom and Dad went out on the town. Though my mother cooked with me during the week, the possibility of appeasing two persnickety palates, all by myself, seemed unlikely. The novelty of cooking out of a box – something Mom staunchly refused to do – and the curiously luminescent orange sauce first drew me to Kraft macaroni and cheese. But it was something else that turned me into a repeat user: That ready-made meal had a miracle ingredient capable of luring brother and sister from the TV to the dinner table in no time flat. After I had completed four or five stints of weekend dinner duty, my mother stumbled onto an empty Kraft box and uncovered my shortcutting scheme. That’s when my formal cooking lessons began. With her faithful “Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book” in hand, Mom thumbed to the section on sauces, pointed to béchamel and motioned for me to read. One gentle nudge was all it took: My questionable culinary course had turned in a new and better direction. Béchamel, also called white sauce, is a classic mother sauce, one of five foundational sauces in French cuisine. Similar to velouté, béchamel starts with roux, a 1-to-1 mixture of flour to butter that is cooked just a few minutes – long enough to eliminate its pasty taste, but short enough to keep it from browning. For every tablespoon of flour or butter, a cup of warm liquid is added to turn that roux into sauce. To the point of adding the liquid, the methods for béchamel and velouté are identical, but here’s where they deviate: While velouté uses veal, poultry or fish stock for the liquid component, béchamel calls for milk so that the sauce becomes whiter and creamier than its stock-based cousin. Velouté also behaves differently as it cooks. The protein in the flour forms a grayish scum on top that most chefs painstakingly skim off to improve appearance and texture. Fortunately, there is no scum to worry about with béchamel. The protein matter put off from the flour gets trapped in the viscous milk, and no amount of skimming will separate the two. The use of milk has a downside, however. Milk is much more prone to scorching, so a watchful eye and regular stirring are especially important. Even when I had mastered béchamel, I still couldn’t figure out quite what to do with it. Classic béchamel is flavored with a mirepoix (a fine dice of carrots, celery and onions that is cooked with the butter), yet it seemed too bland to lavish on any food. Everything finally made sense once I advanced to small sauces, those tasty offspring of mother sauces that have all sorts of goodies blended in. I learned that Mornay sauce is made by adding a mixture of Gruyère and Parmesan cheeses, and aurore sauce gets its rosy hue from a hint of tomato paste or purée. It wasn’t long before I was blending the two into one yummy sauce, slathering it on noodles and calling the creation Julie’s Mac and Cheese. Though my dish was more pink than Kraft-luminescent orange, my sibs immediately gave it a big thumbs up. Eventually, I graduated to soufflés. I knew they got their dramatic height from stiffly beaten egg whites folded into some kind of flavored base, but I was surprised to find out that, for savory versions, that base is often béchamel. In contrast to mac and cheese sauce, the béchamel for soufflé has to be very thick, more like paste than sauce. Mom recommended 1 cup of milk to every 3 tablespoons of flour or butter, and I have stuck with that ratio ever since. When flavoring a béchamel for a soufflé, I also discovered that it is critical to restrict the quantity of added ingredients. For instance, cheese should be limited to 1 cup for every 1 cup of milk in the base. If the béchamel gets too heavy, it will weigh down the egg whites and lead to a less impressive rise. What’s more, never melt the cheese in the béchamel as you would for Mornay sauce, but rather stir it in, grated and off the heat. This extra precaution keeps the base very thick, which, in turn, makes it easier to evenly incorporate the egg whites. Thanks to a single mother sauce (and my well-intentioned mother), my repertoire had rapidly expanded from one new dish to three. In fact, my Fluffy Soufflé-Omelet and Cheddar Cheese Sauce were so popular that Mom assigned me Saturday breakfast duty, too. Hmmm . . . could it be she had an ulterior motive for my cooking lessons, something other than correcting my Kraft mac and cheese faux pas?