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Celery, Braised
Take six heads of celery, trim off the roots, green tops, and outer leaves; cut the portions left to even lengths, and split them through in halves. Wash well and blanch them in boiling salted water for ten minutes. Melt two ounces of butter in a saucepan, and put two ounces each of carrot, turnip, and onion, all sliced, in the bottom of the pan. Lay the celery on them, and cover with buttered paper. Put the lid on the pan, and fry the contents for ten minutes; add one pint and a half of stock, and braise all gently for about two hours, or till the celery is tender. Divide each piece again, and serve on long croutons of bread. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for twelve portions.
A classic braise on a bed of aromatics, and the method still works exactly as written. A few of the quantities and vessels want translating.
- The hinge: keep it barely simmeringBraised celery collapses into strings if it boils. Hold the liquid at a bare tremble, oven or stovetop, so the stalks soften without falling apart.
- Two hours is generousBlanched, split heads of modern celery are usually tender well before that, often in 45 to 70 minutes; test with a knife tip from the 45-minute mark.
- Six heads is a lotThe recipe is scaled for twelve portions. For four, use two heads, i.e. a third of the recipe: about 2/3 oz each of carrot, turnip and onion, and about 1/2 pint of stock, adding a little more if it does not come partway up the celery.
- MeasuresTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. A pint and a half, in an English book of this date, is 30 fl oz — about 3 3/4 US cups. The stock should come partway up the celery, not cover it.
- Buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a disc of parchment, buttered on one side, laid directly on the vegetables under the lid to keep them moist and stop the tops drying. Parchment does the job; foil is a poor substitute because it does not sit against the food as well.
- "Saucepan" here means a braising panYou want something wide and shallow enough to hold the celery in a single layer — a sauté pan with a lid or a shallow casserole. Piling the pieces up gives uneven cooking.
- The cooking liquid is the sauceThe recipe stops short of saying so, but the strained braising liquid, reduced hard until it glazes, is what makes the dish. Spoon it over the celery on the croutons.
- CroutonsLong fingers of bread fried in butter or clarified fat, not modern salad cubes. Make them just before serving so they stay crisp under the sauce.
Braising on a bed of sliced carrot, turnip and onion under buttered paper is straight from the French repertoire that dominated English professional cookery in the nineteenth century — the vegetables are a rudimentary mirepoix, there to perfume the stock and keep the celery off the hot metal. Celery in this period was a labour-intensive crop, trenched and earthed up over weeks to blanch the stalks white, and at its best from autumn through the frosts. That seasonal weight helps explain why a cookbook would give a whole recipe to a vegetable most modern kitchens treat as a soup base. The costing of 1s. 6d. for twelve portions is a reminder of the book's audience — cooks expected to account for what they spent.