Florentine in the name of a dish implies that it is served in the style of Florence which for our purposes means the city in the Tuscany region of Italy by that name. In the simplest terms, this means a dish served with spinach and a cream sauce. However, the dish I am speaking about today is not Italian, but French in nature. To kind of tie French cuisine and the Italian city of Florence together, there is an unauthenticated story concerning the Italian wife of France’s King Henry II, Catherine de Medici. She is credited with introducing a number of Italian foods to France including Italian ices and sherbet. She is also credited with introducing spinach to France somewhere around the year 1550. The story goes that in order to honor her Italian heritage, she decided to call any dish including spinach “Florentine”.

OK, now that we have that out of the way, we can get on to my story. Ms Cocktail and I both hail from Connecticut. Me from the interior recesses and Ms Cocktail from the coast. Both of us have seafood as part of our culinary tradition but her connection to it is much stronger. You see, her uncle was a commercial fisherman and in turn his son, Ms Cocktail’s cousin Mike, also took up that career. Since Mike lives near Ms Cocktail’s mom and the family is pretty close, he often stops by and gives her some fish. This fish sometimes makes its way into our hands as well.

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Today’s post, will be the second piece of the puzzle towards the dish I made on Tuesday. Béchamel isn’t necessarily a dish unto itself, you’d never serve a steaming bowl of hot béchamel unless you are functionally degraded. However, it is a wonderful sauce for several dishes such as lasagna or as a base component for things such as cheese sauces. In fact, my macaroni and cheese dish uses béchamel as the base for the cheese sauce and it is out of this world. The mac and cheese is a story for another day though.

By all accounts, béchamel is very easy to make. At it’s core, it is a butter and flour roux to which scalding milk is whisked into. The thickness of the sauce is governed by the proportions of milk and flour. A very traditional rendering of béchamel would use 2 Tbs butter, 2 Tbs flour and 1 cup of milk. For my recipe, I wanted it a bit thicker so I increased the butter and flour to 3 Tbs each. I’ll give the classic recipe here and you can experiment with the proportions for whichever dish you decide to make. I also made one other change, that was instead of using an onion studded with clove I used chopped onion and loose clove then strained. I use a small sauce pan to make this and I find this technique easier to work with.

Béchamel Sauce

2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs flour
1 cup milk
1/2 tsp salt
1 small onion
3 whole cloves

Peel the onion and stick the cloves into it, set aside. In a small sauce pan, melt the bitter over medium heat and then slowly add the flour. Cook for about three minutes stirring constantly. Slowly add the milk and whisk until fully blended. (Author’s note: You do not want this to clump. When I say to slowly add the milk, that means about 1 Tbs at a time and whisk thoroughly until the roux reaches a liquid like quality. Repeat adding a little more milk each time until all the milk is added.) Once the milk and roux are combined, add the salt and the onion and cook over medium low heat for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Do not boil the mixture and do not let it burn or stick to the bottom of the pan.