Barbara Bretton: Wish You Were Here

What's Cooking?

The Food Goddess is in the Kitchen! I am delighted beyond words to present my friend, my pal, Kali Amanda Browne (daughter of the beauteous and talented Marie) aka The Food Goddess. Enjoy!

Bechamel Sauce for Valentine's

Valentine's Day is saucy!

St. Valentine's Day is the second highest profit-yielding holiday for the restaurant industry. (Trivial Pursuit bonus: Mother's Day is #1.) There are special, over-priced menus created for the occasion. We stay at home, because that's where the love is.

This year, we enjoyed seafood lasagna stuffed with a generous layer of shrimp and lumps of crabmeat from one of our most brilliant local caterers. The center was slathered with a delicious Béchamel sauce. And the whole thing was sprinkled with spicy, seasoned breadcrumbs. I hereby declare Béchamel sauce the dish of true love.

While its history is a little muddy, it is generally accepted that it appears in the culinary world in the French Court of the mid-1700s. Pronounced "bay-shah-mel", I have always thought it perfect that it is homophonic of "bésame" ("kiss me" in Spanish). So, whenever I eat anything that contains Béchamel sauce, the soundtrack in my head is "Bésame Mucho". A good Béchamel is a very sophisticated aphrodisiac.

In the parlance of romance, it is less like the electric, frantic passion of young love and more like the expert hands of a caring lover who has discovered all the secrets of your flesh and can send heavenly waves of pleasure with one caress. It is that good. It is that powerful. It is that mind-blowing.

Béchamel sauce has an inherent maturity. To wit, the offer from the New York restaurant of a "Burger Bouquet" (a pack of tiny burgers, chips and dipping sauces for your manly Valentine) is juvenile. Béchamel is far more grown-up than that. You could call it worldly. It may be old world but it is not old fogey. The sauce possesses the maturity of the tried and true – and in truth there is beauty. Beauty is sexy. Ergo, Béchamel sauce's entire raison d'être is to bring sexy back in a very real and literal way. It starts in your mouth, travels to your brain and sends millions upon millions of messages of bliss to every molecule in your body. It's like rapture without the dogma!

The very first time that Béchamel touched my lips was at a fantastic Spanish restaurant in the West Village (a neighborhood staple strongly attached to the biggest romantic fiasco of my life so it will remain nameless here). Their Chicken Villeroy is a five-star affair if there ever was one. While the recipe is not necessarily complicated, it is sufficiently time-consuming that we prefer to go out for it and have relegated all Villeroy-styled dishes to "special treat" status.

The sauce in itself is a simple white sauce. The French refer to it as a "mere" (a mother sauce) and it serves as the base for several other sauces, including Mornay, mustard, crème and Nantua as well as several other cheese sauces. The Italians claim patrimony from the kitchen of Catherine de Medici.

The Spaniards have made it truly exceptional by lightly boiling meats or fish, coating in the cooled sauce, chilling until it sticks, then breading and frying. The result is a combination of golden, crunchy exterior; followed by creamy, savory sauce; culminating with the pure taste that extols the original product's true essence. The combination of textures and flavors create a perfect matrimony in your mouth. The sauce almost congeals like a thick gelatin and it retains some of that consistency even after cooking, only to melt in your tongue like liquid silk.

The Spaniards, bless their decadent culinary souls, make Villeroy-styled chicken breasts, lamb chops, pork and ham rolls and shrimp. Béchamel is also used in veal canapés and salmon stuffed egg tapas.

I am fairly certain that a very close approximation of Villeroy-styled meat dishes can be duplicated by ending the cooking process in the oven, but I've never tried it. Broiling is a healthier alternative than frying, after all. The sauce itself is a wonderful accompaniment to meats and fish, vegetables, pasta, grains and legumes. For a relatively simple and delicious recipe, try Giada De Laurentiis' Baked Rigatoni with Béchamel Sauce.

Béchamel gives a whole new dimension to the term saucy . . .

You can email me at kali.templeofdoom@gmail.com.