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Cream of Celery Soup
Observe the proportions and directions given in the preceding recipe for Cream of Pea Soup, substituting celery stalks and tender tips for the peas and omitting the sugar.
A variation recipe that borrows its whole method from the Cream of Pea Soup above it, so the first job is reconstructing what that method was. What follows fills in the gaps a modern cook will hit.
- The missing base recipeNothing on this page gives quantities; everything depends on the preceding pea soup. A cream soup of this era is generally built on a white sauce of fat and flour cooked together in equal measure, thinned with milk and the vegetable purée, in the range of 2 tablespoons each fat and flour per pint of liquid. Treat that as the standard pattern rather than a conversion of the original, which is not printed here.
- Snowdrift means the shorteningIf this is one of the Snowdrift promotional books, the fat in the base roux would be shortening rather than butter; Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening. The preceding pea recipe is not printed here, so that cannot be confirmed from this page. Butter is the better choice for a cream soup today.
- "Stalks and tender tips"The tips are the leafy inner heart, which carries most of the aroma. Use a full large head, ribs and heart together, for about 1.5 quarts of finished soup; celery gives up far less body than peas, so the purée will be thinner and the roux is doing more of the work.
- StringsOuter ribs are fibrous and stay fibrous. Peel them with a swivel peeler or plan to pass the cooked purée through a sieve.
- Sieve versus blenderA blender or immersion blender replaces the food mill, but celery fibre survives blending. Push the purée through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the smooth texture the word "cream" is promising.
- Omitting the sugarThe sugar in the pea version was most likely there to flatter dried or older peas. Celery needs none, but it does need salt and white pepper more assertively than peas do, and the soup tastes flat without them.
- Don't boil after the milk goes inMilk held at a hard boil, especially thin milk, can curdle. Keep it at a bare simmer once the dairy is added and finish with cream off the heat.
Cream soups of this kind belong to the era when a household cook was expected to know one white-sauce formula and ring changes on it endlessly — peas, celery, asparagus, corn, tomato — which is exactly why this entry can be a single sentence long and still be a complete recipe. Celery itself was a comparatively expensive vegetable in nineteenth-century America, grown in muck soils around places like Kalamazoo, Michigan, and often served raw in tall glass celery vases as a display of means; by the time books like this one were printed it had come down in price enough to be simmered and sieved.