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Celery Sauce, for Turkeys, Fowls, Etc
Slice the best part of four heads of young celery in small pieces, and boil them in salt and water for twenty minutes. Drain them, and put them into a clean saucepan, with sufficient veal broth or gravy to cover them, add a tea-spoonful of salt, a blade of mace, and stew all gently together until quite tender. Add two ounces of butter, and a dessert-spoonful of flour, and when this is quite smooth, stir in a cupful of good cream. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. per head. Sufficient for a couple of small fowls. If this sauce should be wanted richer, the yolks of two or three eggs may be added, but celery sauce is frequently spoilt by too much seasoning.
A straightforward velvet-textured vegetable sauce, but two things in it need translating: the size of a Victorian head of celery, and the fact that the thickening goes in at the end rather than the start.
- Four heads of celery"the best part" is most likely the pale inner ribs and heart, with the coarse outer stalks and leaves discarded. Trench-grown, earthed-up celery of this period tended to be more slender than the bunches sold now, so two modern bunches trimmed down to the tender inner ribs — roughly 1 lb of prepared celery — is a reasonable working equivalent.
- Go easy on the saltThe closing line is the real instruction: celery sauce is spoiled by over-seasoning. Between the salted blanching water, a stock that is probably already seasoned, and the added teaspoon, the sauce can end up brutally salty. Salt only at the finish, once the cream is in.
- Veal brothVeal stock is a special order at most butchers now. A light unsalted chicken stock is the closest everyday stand-in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the pale colour the sauce is meant to have.
- A blade of maceOne dried piece of the lacy covering of a nutmeg, removed before serving. If you only have ground mace, a small pinch does the job — about 1/8 teaspoon — and there is nothing to fish out afterwards.
- Butter and flour at the endThis is not a roux. Work the 2 oz butter and the flour (a dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons) into a paste, then whisk it into the simmering sauce in small pieces and let it bubble two or three minutes so the flour cooks out. Adding the flour dry will leave lumps.
- Cupful of cream"a cupful" is not a standardised measure in books of this period; about 8 fl oz of a rich cream is a reasonable working amount. Once it is in, keep the sauce below a boil — a hard boil after the cream can spoil the texture.
- Egg yolks, if usedWhisk the yolks with a little of the hot sauce first, then return the mixture off the heat and warm it gently without simmering. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce turns grainy.
- Time and yieldThe stated hour appears to cover the 20 minutes' blanching plus a slow stew until the celery is fully tender. For yield the book says only that it is sufficient for a couple of small fowls.
Celery sauce belongs to a family of pale English sauces — bread, onion, celery, oyster — often said to have been served with roast poultry from the eighteenth century onward, when boiled or roast fowl was expected to arrive with something white and buttery beside it. Celery itself was a fussy, labour-intensive crop in this period: the stalks had to be blanched by banking earth up around the growing plants to keep them pale and sweet. Cassell's habit of giving a probable cost, here 2d. to 4d. a head, is characteristic of the book. The optional egg yolks mark the point where a plain family sauce becomes company food.