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Celery, Essence Of
Put an ounce of pounded celery-seed into a bottle, and pour over it half a pint of spirits of wine, white wine, or brandy. Let this infuse for three weeks, then strain and bottle for use. When wanted, put a few drops upon a lump of sugar, and throw it into the pan, and the flavour will immediately diffuse itself throughout. This is a pleasant addition to salads. Four or five drops on a small lump of sugar will be sufficient for a pint. Probable cost, 2d., exclusive of the spirit.
A Victorian flavouring tincture: celery seed steeped in alcohol, used a few drops at a time where fresh celery is out of season. It still works, and a small bottle lasts years.
- Spirits of wineIn this period the term means rectified ethanol of drinkable grade. It is not the same as today's methylated or denatured spirit, nor isopropyl rubbing alcohol, both of which are poisonous and must never be used for an edible infusion. Use brandy, vodka or another neutral drinking spirit; the higher the proof the better it extracts.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups or 285 ml. One ounce of celery seed is roughly 4 tablespoons whole.
- Pounded, not groundCrack the seed in a mortar so the hulls split; flour-fine grinding makes a cloudy essence that is difficult to strain and turns bitter. Wine will extract less than spirit, so if you use white wine expect a weaker, shorter-lived result that belongs in the refrigerator.
- The three weeksKeep the bottle out of direct light and shake it every day or two. Strain through muslin, then through a coffee filter if you want it clear, and it will keep for years in a tightly stoppered dark bottle.
- "Throw it into the pan"The sugar lump is only a carrier to disperse a few drops evenly; nothing about the sugar is essential. Add the essence off the heat or at the very end, since the alcohol carries the aroma off quickly in a boiling pot.
- Strength and dosageFour or five drops per imperial pint of soup, sauce or dressing is the stated rate, and it is easy to overshoot: celery seed is markedly more pungent and slightly bitter compared with the stalk. Start with three drops and taste.
- Cost and substituteThe "2d." is the price of the seed alone in late Victorian money and means nothing now. Celery salt or a pinch of crushed celery seed will do the same work in most dishes, though neither disperses into a dressing as cleanly.
- Allergen noteCelery, including the seed, is one of the declared major allergens in the UK and EU, and the essence concentrates it. Label the bottle.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a well-run English kitchen kept a shelf of alcoholic essences — of shallot, anchovy, lemon peel, bitter herbs — as a way of holding flavour through the months when the fresh thing was unobtainable. Celery (Apium graveolens) was a winter vegetable, blanched in trenches, so the ripe seed, which keeps well and is far more aromatic by weight than the stalk, was the obvious standby for soups and salad dressings out of season. Alcohol tinctures of this kind sat on the boundary between kitchen and dispensary: "spirits of wine" is also the language of the pharmacopoeia, and celery seed was itself a long-standing folk diuretic, a use often repeated but never well documented.