Modern cookery for private families

This is a fine French white sauce, now very much served at good English tables. It may be made in various ways, and more or less expensively; but it should always be thick, smooth, and rich, though delicate in flavour. The most ready mode of preparing it is to take an equal portion of very strong, pale veal gravy, and of good cream (a pint of each for example), and then, by rapid boiling over a very clear fire, to reduce the gravy nearly half; next, to mix with part of the cream a tablespoonful of fine dry flour, to pour it to the remainder, when it boils, and to keep the whole stirred for five minutes or more over a slow fire, for if placed upon a fierce one it would be liable to burn; then to add the gravy, to stir and mix the sauce perfectly, and to simmer it for a few minutes longer. All the flavour should be given by the gravy, in which French cooks boil a handful of mushrooms, a _few_ green onions, and some branches of parsley before it is reduced: but a good _béchamel_ may be made without them, with a strong _consommé_ (see pale veal gravy, page 98) well reduced. Strong pale veal gravy (flavoured with mushrooms or not), 1 pint: reduced half. Rich cream, 1 pint; flour, 1 tablespoonful: 5 minutes. With gravy, 4 or 5 minutes. _Obs._—_Velouté_, which is a rather thinner sauce or gravy, is made by simply well reducing the cream and stock separately, and then mixing them together without any thickening. BÉCHAMEL MAIGRE. (_A cheap White Sauce._) A good _béchamel_ may be made entirely without meat, when economy is an object, or when no gravy is at hand. Put into a stewpan, or a well-tinned and thick saucepan, with from two to three ounces of butter, a carrot, and a couple of small onions, cut in slices, with a handful of nicely-cleaned mushroom buttons, when these last can be easily procured; and when they have stewed slowly for half an hour, or until the butter is