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Stewed Celery
Clean the heads nicely. Take off all the outer leaves. Cut in small pieces and stew; when tender, add some rich cream, butter and very little flour. Season with pepper, salt and a very little nutmeg if preferred.
A short creamed-vegetable formula of the sort that filled the vegetable chapters of turn-of-the-century books. The instructions omit liquid, quantities and time, so the cook is expected to supply all three.
- What to buy"Heads" means whole bunches of celery, not celeriac and not celery hearts as sold today. Two large bunches, trimmed of leaves and the toughest outer ribs, cook down to about four servings.
- The stewing liquidNo liquid is specified. Cut the ribs into 1-inch pieces and stew them in just enough water or light stock to come halfway up, covered, so they steam as much as boil; the reduced liquid becomes part of the sauce.
- TimingSliced celery is tender in 12 to 18 minutes depending on age and thickness. Older bunches with stringy outer ribs take longer and benefit from being peeled with a swivel peeler first.
- The hingeAdd the flour to the softened butter and cook it briefly before it meets the cream, or stir it into the cream cold. Dropping dry flour into hot liquid at this stage tends to give a lumpy, pasty sauce.
- "Rich cream"Cream was not standardised in this period, so "rich" is a relative term; modern heavy cream is a reasonable stand-in. Half a cup for two bunches, with a tablespoon of butter and a scant teaspoon of flour, gives a sauce that coats rather than floods.
- NutmegFreshly grated, and the recipe means it about "very little" -- a few scrapes. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter and easy to overdo.
- ServingBest as a hot side dish for roast or boiled meat. It holds badly; the sauce thins as the celery goes on releasing water, so finish it just before it goes to the table.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in nineteenth-century America, served upright in tall glass celery vases and set on the table raw as a mark of a well-appointed dinner; cooked-celery recipes of the period may well have used the coarser outer ribs left after the tender hearts had gone to the table. Stewing in cream with a little flour is a common household treatment for vegetables in books of this kind, and the faint nutmeg follows an older English habit of seasoning white sauces with it. The recipe's vagueness is typical of the genre rather than careless.