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Creamed Celery (Wash scrape and cut celery)
Wash, scrape and cut celery in one-half inch pieces. Cook in boiling salted water until tender; drain. (There should be two cups.) Cut a slice from the stem end of one green or red pepper, remove the seeds and veins. Parboil pepper eight minutes; drain and chop half the pepper fine. Add to celery, and reheat in one cup of White Sauce.
A straightforward winter vegetable side that assumes you know what "White Sauce" means, since the book gives it elsewhere. A few notes on quantities and timing.
- The white sauceA period white sauce of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk is the medium consistency (the thin version uses about 1 tablespoon of each); cook the roux a minute or two before the milk goes in. Season it with salt and a little white pepper before it meets the celery; the vegetable itself contributes almost nothing.
- How much celery to buyTwo cups of cut, cooked celery is roughly one large head, or about 1 lb of trimmed ribs. Modern celery is generally less stringy, so the scraping step is largely optional on the inner ribs; do run a peeler over the outer ones.
- Cooking timeCelery in half-inch pieces is tender in 8 to 12 minutes in boiling salted water. Past that it turns limp and grey-green and gives up its texture entirely, which is the whole point of the dish. Drain it well or the sauce will thin out.
- Parboiling the pepperEight minutes softens the pepper and takes off its raw edge. Five minutes is usually plenty for a modern bell pepper, or you can simply sauté the chopped pepper in a little butter instead.
- The other half pepperThe recipe uses half of one pepper and says nothing about the rest. Chop and reserve it, or use a whole small pepper and accept a more assertive dish.
- SeasoningAs written this is very plain. A grating of nutmeg in the sauce, or a spoonful of grated Parmesan stirred in at the end, is in keeping with the period and improves it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of celery in a cup of sauce would serve about four as a side dish. It does not reheat gracefully a second time, as the celery continues to soften.
Creamed celery belongs to a moment when celery was a prestige vegetable rather than a crudité. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was grown intensively in muck-soil districts — the Kalamazoo, Michigan fields were the most famous American source — blanched pale in trenches or with boards, and served at table in its own upright glass vase. Celery also keeps for weeks in a cool cellar, which made it one of the few fresh green things a Northern household could count on in midwinter. The white sauce treatment reflects the domestic-science teaching of the era, in which a small set of "foundation sauces" was taught and then applied to whatever vegetable was in season; Elizabeth O. Hiller, who compiled Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners, worked in that tradition, and the book's structure — a fixed menu for every Sunday of the year — assumes a cook working from a repertoire rather than improvising.