Home › November › Creamed Celery (Wash scrape and cut celery) (II)
Creamed Celery (Wash scrape and cut celery) (II)
Wash, scrape and cut celery in one-half inch pieces; there should be two cups. Cover with boiling salted water and cook until tender. Drain and reheat in one and one-fourth cups of
The text breaks off mid-sentence, so what follows covers the part that survives and flags where you are on your own. Two cups of cut celery serves three to four as a side dish.
- The missing ingredientThe sentence stops at "one and one-fourth cups of" — a common proportion for a cream sauce of this quantity would be 1 to 2 tablespoons butter and the same of flour to 1 1/4 cups milk, seasoned with salt and pepper. Because the original does not say, treat that as a reasonable reconstruction rather than the author's instruction.
- ScrapingScraping is not peeling. Draw a paring knife down the outer face of each rib to lift the tough strings; older, thicker outer stalks need it, pale inner ribs do not.
- "Cook until tender"In practice 8 to 12 minutes at a simmer for half-inch pieces. Stop while the pieces still have a slight bite, since they finish heating in the sauce.
- Salted waterAbout a teaspoon of salt per quart is enough. Celery is naturally saline and the sauce will be seasoned as well, so hold back.
- Save the cooking waterReplacing a few tablespoons of the milk with the celery liquid gives the sauce more flavour than milk alone. The original does not suggest it, but the drained liquid is otherwise wasted.
- Reheating, not boilingFold the drained celery into the finished sauce over low heat just until hot through. A hard boil at this stage thins a flour-thickened sauce and breaks the pieces apart.
- ServingThe sauce skins over quickly, so serve straight from the pan if you can. Paprika or buttered crumbs are a possible finish, though the recipe as it survives calls for neither.
Creamed celery belongs to the long American reign of the white sauce — the Boston Cooking School method by which almost any boiled vegetable could be turned into a respectable dish with butter, flour and milk. Celery itself was still a slightly genteel vegetable in the late nineteenth century, sold in tall cut-glass vases for the table, which is why it recurs in autumn and winter menus of this kind: the crop came in with the frosts, and hearts were eaten raw while the coarser outer ribs were cooked. The "II" in the title simply marks it as a second recipe of the same name.