Instructions: 1. Have ready a large bowl of cold water. Place the flour in a 1-quart saucepan (preferably nonstick) over medium heat. Cook the flour, stirring with a whisk or wooden spoon, until it smells cooked, 3 to 5 minutes

(quite suddenly, youll notice a pronounced toasted smell). Do not let the flour brown. Place the bottom of the saucepan in the bowl of cold water to stop the cooking of the flour. Set the pan aside until it and the flour are cool.

2. Add 1/2 cup of the milk to the flour and whisk to a smooth paste.

Gradually whisk in the remaining milk. Pin the bay leaf to the onion with a clove and add it to the milk with the celery, garlic, and mace.

Gradually bring the mixture to a boil over mediumhigh heat, whisking steadily. The sauce will thicken.

3. Reduce the heat to medium-low and gently simmer the sauce until thick and flavorful, about 10 minutes, whisking occasionally.

4. Strain the sauce into another saucepan, pressing the vegetables with the back of a wooden spoon to extract the juices. Whisk in the butter (if using). Correct the seasoning, adding salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste.

Yield: "2 cups"

Start to Finish Time:
"0:20"

NOTES : The creamy white sauce known as balsamella (bechamel) is, of course, one of the cornerstones of Italian cooking. Trying to create a credible low-fat version nearly drove me crazy. My first attempts involved combinations of skim milk and roasted vegetables. One batch was reasonably tasty, but no one would have called it bechamel. The breakthrough came from a reader in Louisiana, curiously enough, who wrote me about a butterless, oven-baked roux she uses for making low-fat gumbo. That gave me the idea to dry-roast the flour in a saucepan before adding the milk, producing a bechamel with the requisite thickness and cooked-flour taste but without all the customary butter. (I do like to add a tiny piece of butter at the end, however, just for flavor.) I also found that 2 percent milk produced much better results than skim, without unduly tipping the fat scales.

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