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CELERY SAUCE (a quick way)
If celery sauce is wanted in a hurry, some good melted butter may be flavoured with a few drops of the essence of celery, and a little cream or new milk, and a pinch of powdered mace may be added. Time, ten minutes. Sufficient, five drops on a piece of sugar to a pint. Probable cost, 6d. per half pint.
A shortcut version of a sauce that normally begins with an hour of simmering celery heads. Two phrases in it will mislead a modern reader, and both are worth settling before you start.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn British cookery of this period melted butter means a white sauce built on butter, flour and water or milk, not simply liquid butter. The recipe gives no proportions; a common working ratio is around 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to half a pint of liquid. Plain liquid butter with essence stirred in will not give you anything resembling a sauce.
- Essence of celeryA concentrated alcoholic or oil-based extract sold by Victorian grocers and druggists, now hard to find. Celery seed steeped in the hot milk and strained out gives a comparable flavour; celery salt works but you must then cut back the salt elsewhere.
- The sugar lump"Five drops on a piece of sugar to a pint" is a dosing method, not an ingredient list. The essence is counted onto a lump of sugar so the drops can be measured accurately and then carried into the sauce. The sugar itself is incidental.
- New milkFresh whole milk, as distinct from skimmed or the day-old milk a household might have standing. Whole milk or single cream is the equivalent.
- MaceA pinch means a pinch. Ground mace fades fast and the older the jar, the less it contributes; if yours has been open a year, grate a little nutmeg instead and keep it faint.
- HeatKeep the sauce below a boil once the essence and cream go in. Ten minutes is ample, and hard boiling both dulls the celery flavour and risks the milk catching at the base of the pan.
- YieldA pint of sauce would serve perhaps eight to ten as an accompaniment, though the recipe does not say. The "6d. per half pint" is a price note for the Victorian housekeeper.
Celery sauce belonged to the standard repertoire of English boiled-meat cookery: it was sent to table with boiled fowl, turkey, rabbit and sometimes boiled mutton, in the same slot a French kitchen might have used a sauce suprême. The proper version required whole heads of celery, blanched, stewed until soft, and either sieved or left in short lengths in the sauce — slow work, which is why this quicker version is offered for a cook caught short. The shortcut depends on a class of product that has largely disappeared from domestic kitchens: bottled culinary essences of celery, onion, anchovy, shallot and lemon, sold by grocers and chemists and used much as we now use stock concentrates and pastes. The instruction to count drops onto a lump of sugar recalls the pharmacy counter, where the same trick was used to administer measured doses of tinctures.