Home › Soups › Celery Cream Soup
Celery Cream Soup
Boil a small cup rice in three pints milk, until it will pass through a sieve. Grate the white part of two heads of celery (three if small) on a bread-grater; add this to the rice milk after it has been strained; put to it a quart of strong white stock; let boil until celery is perfectly tender; season with salt and cayenne, and serve. If cream is obtainable, substitute one pint for the same quantity of milk.
A late nineteenth-century cream soup built on rice rather than roux, which means it thickens by starch and sieving rather than by flour and butter. Two points decide whether it works: keeping the rice-milk from catching, and not overcooking the grated celery.
- Scale and yieldThree pints of milk plus a quart of stock gives about 2.5 quarts, perhaps eight generous servings. A "small cup" of rice is an inexact period measure; somewhere around 3/4 cup uncooked is a reasonable reading.
- Milk scorchesRice simmered in milk long enough to fall apart, likely 40-50 minutes, will stick and brown on the bottom of a thin pan. Use a heavy-bottomed pot over low heat, stir often, or set the pot over a water bath.
- "Until it will pass through a sieve"This is the test, not a time: the grains must collapse to a purée that goes through a fine mesh under a ladle. A blender or food mill gets you there faster, but still sieve afterwards for the smooth texture the recipe intends.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones and aromatics without roasting, so the soup stays pale. A light unsalted chicken stock is the modern equivalent; avoid dark or heavily reduced commercial broths, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Two heads of celeryA "head" here is the whole bunch, not a rib. Only the pale inner stalks are used; the green outer ribs are stringy and assertive. Grating on a bread-grater releases juice and shreds the fibres, which a food processor's grating disc reproduces well.
- Don't boil the celery long"Until perfectly tender" will likely be ten to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer once grated. Longer and the celery dulls in colour and loses the fresh top note that justifies the dish.
- CayenneUsed as seasoning rather than heat: a scant pinch for the whole pot, enough to lift the milk without being identifiable. Season with salt at the end, since the stock and the reduction both concentrate.
- The cream substitutionThe recipe swaps a pint of cream for a pint of the milk in the pot; adding it off the heat at the finish is a safer modern approach, since cream held at a long simmer can separate.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) belongs to the wave of American community and household compilations that followed the Civil War, and its soup chapter shows the moment when French-derived cream soups were becoming ordinary middle-class fare in the Midwest. The technique here is a starch pur cooked and let down with white stock and enriched with dairy, thickened with rice rather than the flour panada or bread crumb of earlier English cookery; rice was cheap and kept well. Celery itself was still something of a luxury vegetable in 1870s America, grown in blanched trenches and often served raw in tall glass vases on the table as a mark of a well-set dinner, so the instruction to use only the white inner part reflects both taste and the prestige attached to the blanched stalk. The line "if cream is obtainable" is the most telling in the recipe: it assumes a household where milk was reliable but cream was a matter of the season, the cow, and whether the top had already been skimmed for butter.