Béchamel
I learned to cook when I was very young, it began for me more about lack of supervision and creativity, and years later I added to the list of things I knew by reading, working in the industry and school. One important lesson I remember was mother sauces. I didn't give the sauce class as much attention as it deserved and circled back many years later to deepen my toolkit so to speak.
I learned by not watching somebody make them on television, and not reading the recipe once and deciding you understood them. I made each one of them, almost always over and over again. You get to a point where you learn by making mistakes like scorching the milk, breaking the hollandaise, rushing the roux from blond to burnt, and even reducing something so far and it eventually begins to teach you that cooking is far less about following instructions and more about paying attention while you develop your own cadence.
The major players are Béchamel. Velouté. Espagnole. Tomato. Hollandaise. They are terribly old-fashioned now but still hyper relevant when talking about food and cooking. Saying the words "mother sauces" and I immediately picture Ft. Lauderdale culinary school with heavy as hell French textbooks and some chef named Klaus standing over my shoulder just waiting to tell me what I’m doing wrong, but still I think about those moments with reverent and fondness like a perfectly cooked French omelet.
After decades in the kitchen, and a glimpse of what life is like outside of them, I really have begun to wonder whether we were learning something far bigger than sauce work.
Béchamel sauce is literally about as basic and classic as cooking can get, the ingredient list of unsalted butter, flour and whole milk, aside from small classic seasonings like nutmeg, salt and white pepper that's pretty much the whole enchilada, this also means there is absolutely nowhere to hide, burn that blond roux and you will taste it forever, or if you undercook the flour you'll taste that pastiness, or if you get hyper impatient with the dairy and now you're chasing fat flour lumps around the sauce pot with your whisk.
During the first few years I cooked professionally I wanted to get past things like béchamel, as if the limited knowledge I had was a free pass beyond basics. I wanted to get my hands on the expensive ingredients. I wanted to reimagine food and cook the things that looked and seemed like somebody knew what the hell they were doing, flash forward and you cook long enough and find yourself coming back home to the basics. And it's a beautiful awakening, those same skills become very interesting again, it has nothing to do with the simplicity of the recipes, it has more to do with the fact you can’t hide or fake it.
I really find that to be increasingly true away from the kitchen, most of the chaos I've created for myself hasn't come from not knowing some great secret about life, it usually finds me because I knew exactly what I should have been doing, and I just didn't do it. A béchamel will slap you in the face and quickly teach you that lesson if you're willing to listen.
