It might be intimidating for a second (it's got an accented vowel!), but the concept actually seems welcoming. A lot of cooking is essentially variations on a

It might be intimidating for a second (it's got an accented vowel!), but the concept actually seems welcoming. A lot of cooking is essentially variations on a theme. If you can make béchamel, you're now also only a step away from a bunch of other sauces (Mornay, Soubise, etc), simply by adding different ingredients. The technique for making béchamel is similar for espagnole and veloute, but with different liquids in the first step. Extracting out this general principle is, for me, a thousand times more comprehensible than memorizing that (((butter + flour) + milk) + onions) -> soubise but (((butter + flour) + milk) + cheese) -> mornay.