Beside the Stream

One of Sam’s favorite dishes is pasta with white sauce.  This white-on-white meal is classic comfort food.  It’s like macaroni and cheese without the baking, and it’s made out of stuff that I’m likely to have in the kitchen.  

Here’s the tower of ingredients: flour, butter and Parmesan cheese (or Romano or Asiago), heavy cream, milk and some kind of vinegar.  It’s the dash of vinegar that balances the fats and makes it complex and delicious.  Use a white wine vinegar if you want a lighter note, or balsamic vinegar for a bolder tone.  I forgot to put the prosciutto in the picture, and by the time I realized it the Parmesan was gone. 

First you take a chunk of butter: I measured it especially for you and found I liked starting with 3 TBS butter. 

On low heat, you melt the butter and wisk in an equal amount of flour–3 TBS.

Wisk it until it is nice and smooth, and then wisk it as it thickens. 

Wisk in 1/2 cup heavy cream, and it’ll keep on thickening.

Wisk in about 1/2 a cup of milk, until it’s the exact white sauce consistency that will thickly coat the noodles. 

Grate a pile of cheese, and stir a handful into the white sauce; keep wisking until it’s completely melted.   You could add the vinegar and call it done at this point, after you salted and peppered it.  But we’re going one step further because it’s a payback for shovelling mulch. 

The prosciutto has to be fried until the fat is clear, and the meat is slightly browned.  Sam thinks this is a crucial step. 

Then you wisk it into the white sauce, and add a dollop of vinegar–somewhere more than a tsp and less than a TBS.  This works some alchemy with the fats to make the sauce taste cleaner and brighter.  Sam is a big fan of vinegar. 

And that’s it, except for salt and pepper.  (And maybe thyme, it you’re so inclined.) 

If you put it on spinach pasta, you won’t have a white-on-white meal.  But even if the colors aren’t inspiring, it’s a nice dinner.