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Celery Salad
Cut blanched celery very small. Be careful that it is perfectly dry, and do not prepare it until two or three minutes before it is to be used. Pour over it a mayonnaise sauce (see MAYONNAISE) and garnish with green celery-leaves. Time, a few minutes. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. per head. Sufficient, one head for two persons.
A three-line salad whose whole character rests on two words in the first sentence. Read "blanched" correctly and the rest follows.
- "Blanched" is not a cooking stepIn Victorian kitchen-garden language, blanched celery is celery earthed up or wrapped as it grew so the stalks stay pale, tender and mild. Nothing is boiled here. Use the pale inner hearts of a head, not the dark ribbed outer stalks.
- The hinge: dress at the last momentSalted mayonnaise draws water out of cut celery within minutes, thinning the sauce and leaving the salad sitting in a puddle. Cut and dress two or three minutes before serving, exactly as written.
- Perfectly dryWash and cut the celery ahead if you must, then spin or towel it thoroughly and hold it in the refrigerator. Any surface water splits the mayonnaise the same way the celery's own juice does.
- "Cut very small"A fine dice of about 1/4 inch, or thin crescents across the rib. Larger pieces shed water more slowly but make an unwieldy spoonful with thick mayonnaise clinging to them.
- The mayonnaiseThe cross-reference is to Cassell's own MAYONNAISE entry, which would be a hand-made emulsion of the usual sort: raw yolks, oil, vinegar and seasoning. Thin it with a spoonful of cream or a little more vinegar; a stiff mayonnaise will not coat diced celery evenly. Anyone avoiding raw egg should use a commercial mayonnaise, which is made with pasteurised egg.
- Quantities and costOne head for two people, as given. The '2d. to 4d. per head' is a late-Victorian price, though whether 'head' means a head of celery or a person at table is not clear from the entry; either way it tells you nothing useful now beyond that this was a cheap dish.
- GarnishThe recipe asks for green celery-leaves. The paler yellow-green leaves from the heart are the tenderest choice; the tough dark outer leaves are bitter and better saved for stock.
Celery reached the British table as a winter vegetable that had to be worked for: growers trenched it and drew soil up around the stalks through autumn so they would blanch pale and lose their bitterness, which is why Victorian recipes speak of blanched celery as a matter of course rather than as an instruction. That cultivation made it a cold-weather salad ingredient at a season when lettuce was scarce, and it appears throughout nineteenth-century books both raw in salads and stewed as a hot vegetable. Pairing it with mayonnaise reflects the general spread of French cold sauces into English domestic cookery over the later 1800s; the same combination, cut coarser and given a mustard-sharpened dressing, survives in the French cu00leri rémoulade made with celeriac.