A Mornay sauce is a Béchamel sauce

Béchamel sauce

Béchamel sauce , also known as white sauce, is one of the mother sauces of French cuisine and is used in many recipes of Italian cuisine, for example lasagne. It is used as the base for other sauces . It is traditionally made by whisking scalded milk gradually into a white roux...

 with shredded or grated cheese

Cheese

Cheese is a generic term for a diverse group of milk-based food products. Cheese is produced throughout the world in wide-ranging flavors, textures, and forms....

 added. Usually, it consists of half Gruyère and half Parmesan cheese, though some variations use different combinations of Gruyère, Emmental cheese

Emmental (cheese)

Emmental or Emmentaler is a cheese from Switzerland. It is sometimes known as Swiss cheese in North America, Australia and New Zealand, although Swiss cheese does not always imply Emmentaler....

, or white Cheddar

Cheddar cheese

Cheddar cheese is a relatively hard, yellow to off-white, and sometimes sharp-tasting cheese, produced in several countries around the world. It has its origins in the English village of Cheddar in Somerset....

.

It is often served with seafood

Seafood

Seafood is any form of marine life regarded as food by humans. Seafoods include fish, molluscs , crustaceans , echinoderms . Edible sea plants, such as some seaweeds and microalgae, are also seafood, and are widely eaten around the world, especially in Asia...

 or vegetable

Vegetable

The noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant....

s, and serves as a key ingredient in an authentic Hot Brown

Hot Brown

A Hot Brown Sandwich is a hot sandwich originally created at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, by Fred K. Schmidt in 1926. It is a variation of traditional Welsh rarebit and was one of two signature sandwiches created by chefs at the Brown Hotel shortly after its founding in 1923...

 sandwich.

Etymology

Which duc de Mornay, if any, is honored in sauce Mornay is debated: Philippe, duc de Mornay

Philippe de Mornay

Philippe de Mornay , seigneur du Plessis Marly, usually known as Du-Plessis-Mornay or Mornay Du Plessis, was a French Protestant writer and member of the Monarchomaques .- Biography :...

 (1549–1623), Governor of Saumur, and seigneur du Plessis-Marly, writer and diplomat, is generally the favored candidate, but a cheese sauce at his table would have to have been based on what we would term a velouté sauce

Velouté sauce

A velouté sauce, pronounced , along with Allemande, Béchamel, and Espagnole, is one of the sauces of French cuisine that were designated the four "mother sauces" by Antonin Carême in the 19th century. The French chef Auguste Escoffier later classified tomato, mayonnaise, and Hollandaise mother...

, for Béchamel had not been invented. Sauce Mornay does not appear in Le cuisinier Royal

Le Cuisinier Impérial

A[lexandre] Viard's Le Cuisinier Impérial was a culinary encyclopedia that passed through at least thirty-two editions in its long career as the essential reference work for the French professional chef during the nineteenth century. During its long run it was a staple of its publisher, J.-N...

, 10th edition, 1820; perhaps sauce Mornay is not older than the great Parisian restaurant of the 19th century, Le Grand Véfour

Le Grand Véfour

Le Grand Véfour, the first grand restaurant in Paris, France, was opened in the arcades of the Palais-Royal in 1784 by Antoine Aubertot, as the Café de Chartres, and was purchased in 1820 by Jean Véfour, who was able to retire within three years, selling the resataurant to Jean Boissier...

 in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, where sauce Mornay was introduced. In the tout-Paris of Charles X, the Mornay name was represented by two extremely stylish men, the marquis de Mornay and his brother, styled comte Charles; they figure in Lady Blessington's memoir of a stay in Paris in 1828–29, The Idler in France. They might also be considered, when an eponym

Eponym

An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named...

 is sought for sauce Mornay.

See also

• Velouté sauce
  Velouté sauce
  A velouté sauce, pronounced , along with Allemande, Béchamel, and Espagnole, is one of the sauces of French cuisine that were designated the four "mother sauces" by Antonin Carême in the 19th century. The French chef Auguste Escoffier later classified tomato, mayonnaise, and Hollandaise mother...
  
  
• Béchamel sauce
  Béchamel sauce
  Béchamel sauce , also known as white sauce, is one of the mother sauces of French cuisine and is used in many recipes of Italian cuisine, for example lasagne. It is used as the base for other sauces . It is traditionally made by whisking scalded milk gradually into a white roux...
  
  
• Mother sauces
• Hot Brown sandwich
  Hot Brown
  A Hot Brown Sandwich is a hot sandwich originally created at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, by Fred K. Schmidt in 1926. It is a variation of traditional Welsh rarebit and was one of two signature sandwiches created by chefs at the Brown Hotel shortly after its founding in 1923...