After over nine years of blogging, after two béchamel recipes both using the microwave, and after mentioning béchamel multiple times in various recipes, I think it’s finally time to write the recipe for classic béchamel.

Or rather: the classic béchamel as I make it, in my kitchen, with my hands and my utensils, and without any pretense of calling it traditional, true, or original.

A necessary clarification, always made when I’ve written about traditional recipes, indispensable in this current era, where there are people who arrogate the right to hurl insults at those who ‘dare’ not have a feeling (let’s put it like that, because saying I don’t like it or saying I prefer to make the recipe in another way is not allowed) with some traditional recipes. But it seems that there are those who believe that having the audacity to personalize a recipe to one’s own taste should be just cause for insults.

This current mix between, on one hand, an unstoppable globalization of recipes, where everyone replicates the recipes of the entire world, and, on the other hand, a maniacal attachment to traditional recipes (but only their own never those of others, because the traditional recipes of others don’t count and are worth less), I frankly struggle to understand this short circuit. It hasn’t been long since recipes weren’t considered a cause for resentment and conflict but were, simply, food. Since cooking was a simple daily activity and not a competition.

I’ve recently received insults for daring to write in an online conversation that I don’t like carbonara and that (at my home and without ever intending to write down the recipe) I personalize it to make it suitable for me. A stranger felt the need to intervene with gratuitous insults directed at me and, not satisfied, at all my regional compatriots. And this is what disturbed me the most, realizing that there is someone (really??) who uses regional recipes as a flag of superiority, as if we weren’t living in a single Italy but still today in Grand Duchies, Two Sicilies, and the Papal States. Are we really in such a state?

Traditional recipes are a heritage, and there are registered recipes and regulations that protect them. But cuisine, like everything, evolves. Nothing remains static (oops, except for some not-so-thoughtful thoughts…). Fusions are natural and inevitable, in the kitchen as in every other field. Have you ever thought, for example, about how language evolves? Even without going into Latin and vernacular, just take a book from a few decades ago to see the obvious differences in the current way of writing and speaking. Perhaps in the future, the language of my grandparents will disappear entirely, that dialect they had as their only language, that my parents still speak every day alongside Italian, that dialect I speak very little like I speak little English, and that my children don’t speak at all while knowing English perfectly. Similarly, I believe that in a few generations it will be normal to cook things that we now reject, or perhaps don’t even know yet. It might happen that my beloved traditional piada with lard, once indispensable and now coexisting with the oil version, will no longer be a priority because perhaps no one will buy lard anymore (possible? impossible? who can say?). And it might happen, perhaps, that carbonara (or pizzoccheri or vincisgrassi) will no longer be identical to the one for which someone now feels free to hurl insults (possible? impossible? who can say?).

It may seem that I’m rambling away from the béchamel you expected, but no, because this parallel between food and language made me recall a memory.

Once upon a time, we – my grandmother, my childhood mom, and me as a child – called béchamel balsamella. Yes, just like Artusi called it. Did you too? And if so, when did you stop calling it balsamella? I don’t know, maybe at the end of the ’70s. Even my mom no longer uses this outdated term, but no one ever told us to change it, no one told us we had to call it béchamel, it was an unconscious update.

And if one day it should happen that, consciously or not, some recipe will be modified, deep down… what problem could it ever be? But is it really a serious issue to debate, or offend, about how carbonara should be made (not in a restaurant, but at home, where hopefully one can do whatever they want) now, in the sea of enormous problems in which we’re floundering in this era? But do we really have to read venomous comments every day against those who dared to add, I don’t know, say cocoa to pastiera, or cooked ragù for less than eight thousand hours, or similar things? But where does all this meanness, rudeness, and even arrogance come from? Please!

Now I’ll write about my béchamel. Obviously, if you’d like to read it. Otherwise, and as with everything, there are plenty of béchamels of all types and kinds… I’m sure the web is full of them (and thank goodness for that!). 🙆‍♀️🤗

〰〰〰