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Celery Garnishing
Cut the tops off two heads of celery, leaving each head about eight inches long. Point the roots, and put them in boiling water for eight or ten minutes. Tie them together, and put them in a saucepan; cover them with good stock, and add a table-spoonful of pot fat, one carrot, one onion stuck with two cloves, a little salt and pepper, and a bay-leaf. Close the saucepan, and let the contents simmer gently for an hour and a half, then drain the celery and arrange it round a dish of boiled fowls, etc. Probable cost, 2d. or 4d. per head. This quantity will be sufficient for a small dish of fowls.
A Victorian braised-celery garnish, meant to be laid around a platter of boiled fowl. The method is sound; the timing belongs to a tougher vegetable than the celery sold today.
- The hinge: cut the braising timeNinety minutes of simmering will reduce modern celery to threads. Trimmed hearts in stock need roughly 25 to 40 minutes, covered, until a knife slides through the base with no resistance.
- "Two heads of celery"Two whole heads with the tops cut away, leaving about eight inches, root end left intact to hold each head together; the recipe does not say to strip off the outer ribs. Victorian celery was commonly earthed up or blanched in trenches and came to market as a solid head rather than as loose ribs in a bag.
- "Point the roots"Pare the root end to a blunt cone with a paring knife, the way you would trim a leek base, so the head stays in one piece and looks tidy on the dish. Wash carefully between the outer ribs; trench-grown celery carried a great deal of grit.
- Pot fatThe fat skimmed from the top of a stockpot or dripping jar. A tablespoon of butter, beef dripping or the fat lifted from chilled chicken stock does the same job.
- Stock quantity"Cover them with good stock" is the only measure given; expect to need 2 to 3 cups for two heads in a narrow pan. A tight-fitting lid and a pan that just holds the celery keeps the amount down.
- The blanching stepEight to ten minutes in boiling water before braising takes the edge off the celery and begins to soften it. Keep the step.
- Don't waste the liquidThe strained braising stock is well flavoured with celery, carrot, onion and clove. Reduce it hard and spoon it over the celery, or add it to the sauce for the fowl.
- YieldThe recipe says only that this quantity is 'sufficient for a small dish of fowls'; no number of eaters is given. Split each head lengthwise before serving if the hearts are large.
Celery reached the English kitchen as a winter vegetable, grown in trenches and earthed up so the stalks blanched pale and lost their bitterness — a labour-intensive crop, and one Cassell's lists here at twopence or fourpence. Its place in this book is instructive, because a Victorian dinner judged a dish partly by how it was dressed for the table. Boiled fowl, pale and plain, needed something around the rim, and braised celery hearts gave both colour contrast and a flavour that echoed the stock the bird had cooked in. The technique — blanch, then braise in stock with a carrot, a clove-stuck onion and a bay leaf — is the standard brais\em> to any firm vegetable in French-influenced English cookery of the period.