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Celeriac
Well wash and peel the celeriac. Cut them in quarters and boil in boiling salted water until quite tender. Drain well and arrange in a hot dish and pour egg sauce over them.
For egg sauce, blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 1 cup milk and stir till boiling, add seasoning of salt and pepper and boil for 8 minutes, stirring all the time, then add 2 hard-cooked eggs rubbed through a sieve, mix well and serve.
A plain vegetable dish from the Crisco era: boiled celery root under a white sauce enriched with sieved hard-cooked egg. Two things need attention — the size of the celeriac pieces and the length of the sauce boil.
- Buying and trimmingCeleriac is sold as a knobby brown root, usually 1–2 lb each. Allow about 1 lb for two people; peel deeply with a knife rather than a peeler, since the skin is corky and the root channels hold grit.
- Quarters are too bigQuartered, a large celeriac takes 30–40 minutes and the outside collapses before the middle gives. Cut into 1½-inch wedges or chunks and simmer 15–20 minutes, until a knife slides in with no resistance.
- Keep it from browningCut celeriac discolours quickly. Drop the pieces into acidulated water as you work, and add a squeeze of lemon to the cooking water to keep them pale.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, a relatively new product at the time; recipes that call for it by brand name often come from collections associated with its promotion, though that cannot be confirmed from this page alone. Butter makes a better sauce here, in the same quantity; any neutral solid fat or oil works if you want it dairy-free apart from the milk.
- Eight minutes of boilingThat is a long time for a cup of milk with 2 tablespoons of flour — the sauce will thicken hard and can catch. Two to three minutes at a bare simmer, stirring, is enough to cook out the flour taste; slacken with more milk if it tightens past pouring consistency.
- The eggs go in off the heatAdd the sieved eggs after the sauce has stopped boiling, or the yolk protein will granulate. Sieving gives a smoother sauce than chopping; press the whites through too, or chop them fine and fold in.
- SeasoningCeleriac and a flour-and-milk sauce are both bland. Be free with salt and white pepper, and a grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of the celeriac cooking water will lift it.
- YieldAs written the sauce covers about 1½–2 lb of celeriac, serving four as a side dish.
Celeriac — celery grown for its swollen root rather than its stalks — was long more familiar on Continental tables than British or American ones. Serving a boiled vegetable under a white sauce stiffened with sieved hard-cooked egg is standard Victorian and Edwardian practice: the same egg sauce was poured over salt cod, salmon and cauliflower, and it was a cheap way to make a plain vegetable into a supper dish. The Crisco in the sauce sets an earliest date for the page, since Crisco was introduced in 1911, though the shortening remained in use for decades afterwards.