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tablespoons unsalted butter
    1½ tablespoons Italian 00 or all-purpose flour
    1 cup milk
    salt and freshly milled white or black pepper
    whole nutmeg
    Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and then stir in the flour, cooking for 2–3 minutes until you have a walnut (sized and colored) paste. Meanwhile, heat the milk (I do this in a measuring cup in the microwave—very moderne ) and take the pan with the roux off the heat. Gradually, using a whisk, beat the warm milk into it. Proceed slowly and cautiously to avoid lumps. Keep stirring and adding, adding and stirring, and when all the milk is smoothly incorporated, season with salt, pepper, and a grating of the nutmeg. If it does go lumpy, blitz it in your blender or with a hand-held equivalent.
    Return to the heat and cook, at a lowish simmer, stirring all the time, for about 5 minutes (at least twice that if you’re using ordinary all-purpose flour) until the sauce has thickened and has no taste of flouriness. Add some more nutmeg before using. And if you want to make your béchamel in advance, you can stop a skin forming by pouring a thin layer of milk or melted butter on top. Makes about 1 cup.
    If you want a more intensely flavored sauce, heat 1 cup of milk first with 1 onion, ½ white part of a leek, sliced, or some sliced scallion whites, and 2 bay leaves or some mace (or whatever flavor it is you wish to intensify). Let it infuse, lid on, off the heat for 20 minutes or so before proceeding with the sauce.
    CHEESE SAUCE
    To make cheese sauce, add a pinch of English mustard powder or cayenne along with the flour and about ½–1 cup (depending on how you want to use your cheese sauce) grated cheddar or Gruyère, or half Gruyère, half Parmesan, at the end.
    PARSLEY SAUCE
    For parsley sauce—heavenly with cooked ham or to blanket fava beans—just infuse the milk with the stalks from a decent bunch of parsley. Then blanch the parsley leaves (although I have to say I don’t always bother), dry them thoroughly, chop them finely, and add them when stirring in the milk, sprinkling over a little more parsley at the end. And you can chop up leftover ham and mix it with the cold sauce, together with some dry mashed potatoes and possibly chopped gherkins or capers, to make parsley and ham patties. I sometimes add 1 egg yolk and 2–3 tablespoons heavy cream to make a more voluptuous parsley sauce—especially good with poached smoked fish and mashed potato. (And you can make patties out of these, too.)
    PARSLEY AND HAM PATTIES
    This is the way I make béchamel sauce most of the time. My mother’s method was the same as above, except she put a little nut of a chicken bouillon cube—a quarter to a third of a cube—in the pan along with the butter and flour and made roux of them all together. This makes a good savory sauce; the stock isn’t very pronounced, it just gives a more flavorful saltiness. So make really sure you don’t season without thinking.
    MY MOTHER’S WHITE SAUCE
    I use this method to make a white sauce to coat leeks or onions, using half milk and half the water the onions or leeks have been cooking in. Sometimes, even better, I use half light cream and half the vegetable cooking water. If no cream’s available, I beat in an extra nut of butter at the end.
    VEGETABLE SOUP
    A vegetable soup doesn’t really require a recipe, and I certainly don’t want to suggest you get out your measuring cups to make it with mechanical accuracy. But it’s helpful to have a working model for a plain but infinitely variable soup. This one is not exactly the mix of carrot, parsnip, and turnip my mother used to make, and which we knew as nip soup, but is based on its memory.
    I use vegetable bouillon cubes to make the stock for this most of the time, but if I’ve got some good organic vegetables for the soup that taste properly and vigorously of themselves, I use water. A friend of mine swears that if you use Evian or other bottled still water it makes all the