I am going to give you two recipes for White Sauce. The first is the classical one for Bechamel. The second is out of an English cookery book, the name of which I will not mention, for obvious reasons. The first of these sauces is edible and very delicious wherever a white sauce is to be used, whether with fish, poultry or vegetables.

The second one, to my mind, is distinctly not edible, but I have found another use for it, and a very practical one. As there are blank pages at the end of each section of this book for further recipes which you have collected or will collect, I thought it might be helpful if you had a recipe for paste with which to paste them in. If you omit the parsley and the " teaspoon " of milk, which are perhaps superfluous, you will have a perfect paste. But do not make a mistake and plaster it on the fish.

I now give you the edible white sauce:

Ingredients

3 ozs. of butter, 1 1/2 ozs. flour, 1 1/2 pints of milk, 2 ozs. of chopped onion, the same of carrots, a bouquet of mixed herbs, salt and pepper.

Method

Chop the onion and carrot and put them in a saucepan with 1 oz. of butter, and simmer very gently for 10 minutes without browning. Remove from the saucepan and set aside. Put the flour and more butter in the same saucepan and with a wooden spoon, over a very slow fire, work into a perfectly smooth paste, stirring continuously. Then add the boiling milk very gradually, still stirring. Stir unceasingly till it comes to the boil, season highly with salt and pepper, add the onions, carrots and the herb bouquet, and now, without covering the saucepan, simmer very gently for three-quarters of an hour, stirring occasionally. It is best to stand the saucepan on a boiling-mat. When done, pour it through a wire sieve into a smaller saucepan, stir in a small piece of butter, and serve at once.