Comments | marveen: Why The Martha Irritates Me, part nineteen or thereabouts

marveen

Why The Martha Irritates Me, part nineteen or thereabouts

Mar 21, 2013 18:57

I was sick today and dozed off on the couch, and when I woke up The Martha was doing her trademark song and dance about...white sauce ( Read more... )

Comments 6

conuly March 22 2013, 02:02:39 UTC

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Flour, butter, milk, right? This needs instructions? From a chef? Don't care what you call it, but it's not that tricky, is it?

marveen March 22 2013, 05:33:00 UTC

Yep. I knew how to make mac-n-cheese via white sauce before I was seven.

zorn24601 March 22 2013, 03:13:34 UTC

I get the idea you say 'The Martha' the way Christians say 'The Antichrist'.

seidhr March 27 2013, 16:07:39 UTC

I'd never in my life heard it called white sauce until I moved to the South. It was always called bechamel when I was growing up (and in fairness, that is the proper name of white sauce, in French cooking).

marveen March 27 2013, 18:34:42 UTC

Um. My oldest cookbook, the White House cookbook (copyright MCCMLXXXVII) lists bechamel and white sauce separately: "white sauce" on page 165, bechamel on page 168. The instructions for bechamel tell you to simmer a lot of vegetables and herbs in it, then strain them out; the white sauce is simple white sauce.

I know that modern usage has it that these are the same thing and identical, but I never heard the name "bechamel" until I was in my twenties, and when exactly the recipes merged is beyond me. (The family cookbook growing up was good old Betty, and SHE calls it white sauce. Or she did in the 1961 edition, anyway.)

Interesting sidebar: the White House book uses "macaroni" to refer to any pasta, giving vermicelli and spaghetti as examples of "small macaroni" and telling the cook to break them up if necessary.

seidhr March 29 2013, 00:10:06 UTC

I'm not trying to say that you're wrong about what it should be called, or that your cookbooks don't say what they say. But a bechamel traditionally is just the flour, fat and milk (it's one of the three basic "mother sauces" in French cooking, as I'm sure you already knew). Other adaptations of the "mother sauce" have onions, herbs or whatever else, but it's not part of the traditional model/recipe and most of those adaptations wind up with new/different names ( ... )