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Celery, Boiled
Have ready a saucepan of boiling water, with a little salt in it. Wash the celery carefully. Cut off the outer leaves, make the stalks even, and lay them in small bunches. Throw these into the water, and let them boil gently until tender, leaving the saucepan uncovered. When done, drain, and place them on a piece of toast which has been dipped in the liquid. Pour over them a little good melted butter, and serve. Time: young celery, three-quarters of an hour; old, one hour and a half. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. per head. Sufficient, one head for two persons.
A plain Victorian vegetable course that needs one substantial correction: the cooking time. Modern celery is younger, thinner-ribbed and far more tender than the trench-grown heads Cassell's cook was working with.
- Cut the time drasticallyThree-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half will reduce supermarket celery to grey threads. Trimmed bunches of ribs need 8-15 minutes in gently boiling salted water, until a knife tip meets no resistance at the thickest part.
- "Good melted butter"In a British book of this date this is not simply butter melted in a pan but the standard white sauce of the period: butter, a little flour and water or milk cooked to a pourable consistency. Plain warm butter is the modern reading and works, but it is not what the original meant.
- Leave the lid offThe instruction is explicit in the original, though no reason is given. An uncovered pan was standard practice for boiled green vegetables, usually explained as letting volatile acids escape so the ribs stay pale green rather than olive; the same would apply to a short boil.
- Bunching the stalksTying each small bundle with kitchen string keeps the ribs from splaying and breaking up, and lets you lift them out whole to drain. Cut the ribs to a uniform length so they cook evenly.
- The toastThe toast dipped in the cooking liquid presumably serves to absorb the water the celery gives up. Use a firm, close-crumbed bread and dip it briefly, or it collapses before it reaches the table.
- Save the cooking waterBeyond dipping the toast, the strained liquid is a useful, strongly flavoured base for the sauce or for soup. Salt it lightly at the start with that in mind.
- YieldOne head for two people is generous by modern standards; a single large head will serve three or four as a side dish.
Boiled celery as a hot vegetable course was standard in nineteenth-century British cookery, where celery was a winter crop earthed up in trenches to blanch the stalks and grown to a size and toughness that genuinely rewarded long cooking. Cassell's places it among the plainest of vegetable dishes, distinguished only by the toast beneath, a device used across the period for any watery vegetable served in sauce, from asparagus to spinach. The costing of 2d. to 4d. per head marks it as an everyday item rather than a luxury, and the distinction the book draws between "young" and "old" celery reflects a season that ran from autumn well into the new year, the later heads coarser and needing far longer at the boil. Raw celery in the modern sense, sold trimmed and eaten from the stalk, belonged then chiefly to the dessert or cheese course, where it appeared in a celery glass on the table.