Celery Sauce
Make drawn butter same as for oyster sauce, add four heads of celery that have been boiled in salted water until tender and chopped very fine. Add mace; salt and pepper to taste.
A Victorian white sauce built on drawn butter, the flour-thickened butter sauce that stood in for béchamel in most nineteenth-century American kitchens. Two things need translating: what drawn butter actually is, and how much celery four heads represents.
- Drawn butter, definedIn American cookbooks of the period it is usually more than melted butter: a common version is a roux of about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked without colour, whisked into a cup of hot water or light stock, simmered until it loses the raw flour taste, then finished with another lump of butter off the heat. Milk or cream in place of the water gives a richer sauce and is a reasonable substitution.
- Four heads of celeryA head is the whole bunch, not a single rib, but nineteenth-century market celery was generally smaller than modern celery and often trench-blanched pale. Four modern heads would swamp a cup of sauce; two, trimmed of the coarse outer ribs, gives roughly the intended proportion of about 1 to 1½ cups chopped cooked celery to 1 cup of sauce. Adjust to taste rather than by count.
- Cook the celery separatelyBoiling in salted water first, then chopping, is deliberate. It softens the strings and drives off the raw grassy note. Simmer the ribs 12-15 minutes until a knife goes through without resistance, drain well, then chop fine so the sauce stays pourable.
- Save the cooking waterThe celery liquor makes a better base for the drawn butter than plain water. Use it in place of some or all of the liquid and the sauce tastes of celery twice over.
- MaceGround mace, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, is warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. A generous pinch is enough for this quantity; nutmeg can stand in at a similar quantity but tastes noticeably different.
- TextureChopped fine gives a slightly rough, old-fashioned sauce. If you want it smooth, blend and pass through a sieve before adding the mace and seasoning, and hold back a little liquid since blending thins it.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 to 2½ cups as scaled here, enough for four to six. This is the traditional accompaniment to boiled or roast fowl, turkey and boiled ham, and it holds well over low heat if you stir it and add a spoonful of liquid as it thickens.
Celery sauce belongs to the long English tradition of vegetable sauces served with boiled poultry, and it crossed to American cookbooks with the rest of that repertoire. Celery itself was a comparatively expensive and prestigious vegetable through the nineteenth century, grown blanched in trenches and often set on the table upright in a special glass celery vase as a display item; using four heads in a single sauce marked the dish as generous rather than thrifty. The instruction to build on drawn butter, and to cross-reference the oyster sauce rather than repeat the method, is typical of the compressed house style of such compilations, which assumed every cook already had drawn butter by heart. Mace is the finishing spice here, a familiar choice in English sauces.