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Celery Sauce
Scrape the outside stalks of celery and cut in pieces an inch long, let stand in cold water half hour, then put in boiling water enough to cover, and cook until tender; drain off water and dress with butter, salt, and milk or cream, thickened with a little flour : Or, make a dressing by adding to half pint milk or cream, the wellbeaten yolks of two eggs, a bit of butter, and a little salt and pepper or grated nutmeg; bring just to boiling point, pour over stewed celery, and serve with roast duck. -Mrs. A. Wilson.
Two finishes for the same pan of stewed celery: a plain flour-thickened cream sauce, or a yolk-enriched one closer to a thin custard. The second is the better sauce and the one that can go wrong.
- The hinge: do not let the yolk version boil"Bring just to boiling point" is best read as taking it off at the first tremble, well short of a true boil. Egg yolks begin to set from about 150F and curdle outright once the milk simmers, leaving grainy sauce. Warm it gently, stir constantly, and temper a ladle of hot milk into the yolks before they meet the pan.
- Half pintOne cup, 240 ml. Enough to dress roughly a head's worth of cut celery; the recipe itself gives no quantity of celery and no serving number.
- "Scrape the outside stalks"The outer ribs of nineteenth-century celery were coarse and stringy. A vegetable peeler down the ribbed side takes the strings off in seconds; inner stalks need nothing.
- The half-hour soakProbably partly to crisp limp market celery and partly to loosen grit from the earthed-up stalks. With modern washed celery it is optional, though the cold soak does firm up tired ribs.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none. Inch pieces in boiling water are tender in 8 to 12 minutes; push past that and they go limp and drab. Salt the cooking water, which the recipe does not mention.
- Save the cooking liquidCelery water is well flavoured and the recipe throws it out. For the flour version, use half celery liquor and half cream and the sauce tastes of the vegetable rather than of milk.
- The first version's proportions"A little flour" is unmeasured. A tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon of butter, then let down with a cup of milk, gives a sauce that coats without gluing.
- Beyond duckThe yolk sauce suits roast goose, boiled fowl and turkey as readily as duck, and stands up to a plain baked ham.
Celery sauce was standard equipment in Anglo-American cookery for boiled and roast poultry, chiefly documented from the early nineteenth century onward, and appears in English household books of the period before crossing into American ones like this. It belongs to a family of white sauces built on a single vegetable — onion, cucumber, celery — meant to relieve the richness of fat birds, and boiled fowl, turkey, duck and goose were all served with it. Celery itself was a fussy, labour-intensive crop then, blanched by banking soil or boards against the growing stalks to keep them pale and mild, which is why the recipe assumes gritty outer ribs that need scraping and soaking. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Minnesota and Ohio in 1877 from contributed household recipes, credits this one to Mrs. A. Wilson, and its two-option structure — the plain flour dressing or the richer yolk one — is typical of a book written for cooks who might or might not have cream and eggs to spare.