Apart from things like cheese on toast, and pastry, white sauce was one of the first things I learned how to cook, but unlike this recipe leaflet from Carnation evaporated milk, we only used ordinary milk at home. Butter, plain flour, milk salt and pepper… lots and lots of stirring, and making sure the flour and butter roux cooked thoroughly before adding the milk, and it was actually quite easy, or so I thought! White sauce featured on quite a lot of our food, broccoli, cauliflower, broad beans, asparagus; these days we only have it with cheese on cauliflower, and the other vegetables we just have naked.
I didn’t realise that when we were making white sauce, as my grandmothers had, and no doubt their grandmothers before them, we were making béchamel sauce, named after Monsieur Béchamel who was a financier and courtier to Louis XIV of France. he may have given his name to the sauce, but I’m sure people were making similar sorts of sauces across Europe before then. The white sauce with cheese which graces our cauliflower is mornay sauce it seems. On investigating there are other sauces with a white sauce base, nantua sauce which is made with crayfish and butter and cream, crème sauce which as you might guess is made with cream, mustard sauce and soubise sauce which is made with butter as usual, but butter which has very finely chopped onions sweated in it… which sounds rather nice, and not dissimilar to onion sauce that we had at home with lamb, which also had a good splosh of what was called cooking sherry (just cheap sherry I guess!)
To add to the debate on white sauce, if there is one, some English people have white sauce with Christmas pudding… I reacted with horror when I heard this… white sauce??? Christmas pudding??? But of course the white sauce for the pud is a sweetened sauce, the milk thickened with cornflour not wheat flour… although my cousin makes savoury white sauce with cornflour… good grief! What is true white sauce? I think I’ll leave it with the saying ‘each to his own’!
Lois Elsden 