Mother (F&*%ing) Sauces

This demented-looking chappy is Careme, famous dead French chef and codifier of the four sauces upon which frog cuisine is based: Allemande, Bechamel, Espagnole, and Veloute. (There are accents sprinkled throughout these sauce names, but after spending the last 45 minutes wrangling with sauce no.2, I can't be bothered.) These are called the Mother Sauces, and I've made a mini-career writing-wise of avoiding writing a heavily-metaphorical essay combining the subjects of cooking and motherhood and speculating as to whether success in the kitchen is necessary for nourishing, maternal parenting, blah blah blah. The point being that in my own decades-long kitchen career, I've only had occasion to make Bechamel (many times) and it NEVER goes quite the way it's supposed to. It would be easy to blame this on my stove, which has gas burners labeled "Maximum Output" but seem in reality to have only two settings - half-dead Zippo Lighter and SCORCH. According to the make-and-freeze lasagna primavera recipe I'm making, the white sauce that serves as its base should thicken up after only 2 or 3 minutes of simmering. Like fun it will. I've had the same experience making custard (lemon curd, specifically) but those recipes at least provide a temperature to shoot for, allowing me to hover obsessively over the pan with my digital instant-read thermometer reassuring myself that breaking, curdling, burning, or any other of the horrors that can befall a sauce will not happen to mine.


There is something very wrong with the fact that I can make my own snowflake-shaped marshmallows to float in my hot cocoa and yet am so bedeviled by this simple sauce. I will not be present when this particular lasagna is served - I'm working through four dinners in a row this week, so while guilt is not listed in the recipe, it is definitely among the ingredients. I will have to hear second-hand whether the lasagna is creamy and cheesy and holds together as it ought, or whether the removal of the first piece causes the entire rest of the thing to slump despondently into the hole.