Home › The Principles of Cookery › Celery Soup
Celery Soup
Cut the white part of four heads of celery into pieces about an inch long, and put them into a saucepan with a pint of good white stock, two ounces of butter, a quarter of a pound of lean ham, and a lump of sugar. Let them boil for a quarter of an hour, put in with them three pints more of stock, a little salt, and a blade of mace. Stew gently for an hour, then press the soup through a coarse sieve. Make it hot again, pour it into a tureen, add a pint of boiling cream, and serve immediately with toasted sippets. If liked, this soup may be thickened with a little flour. Probable cost, 10d. per pint if cream be used. Sufficient for eight persons.
A straightforward white vegetable soup, generous with cream by modern standards. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the quantities and terms need translating.
- Four heads of celeryVictorian celery was usually blanched pale by earthing up, which is what "the white part" refers to; three large modern bunches, trimmed to the pale inner ribs and hearts, gives roughly the right volume. Keep the green outer stalks and leaves for stock rather than the soup, as they can turn it bitter and dull the colour.
- The stock is the dishFour pints of white stock carries all the savour here. Use a light chicken or veal stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since the ham and the reduction will both add salt. A dark or heavily reduced stock will muddy both flavour and colour.
- Lean hamA quarter pound of lean ham means a piece of cooked or dry-cured ham used as a flavouring, removed at the sieving stage. A thick slice of unsmoked gammon or prosciutto trimmings works; avoid heavily smoked ham, which overwhelms celery.
- A blade of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in blades or ground. One blade, or about a quarter teaspoon ground, is the whole spicing of the soup apart from salt and the lump of sugar.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a coarse sieve leaves celery fibre behind, which is the point. A blender or stick blender will purée the strings rather than remove them, so blend first if you like, then still pass the soup through a sieve.
- A pint of boiling creamThis is the one instruction worth moderating. A full pint of cream to four pints of soup is very rich; half a cup to a cup of hot cream stirred in off the boil is nearer modern taste. Add it hot but do not let the finished soup boil hard afterwards, or it may separate.
- ThickeningThe recipe says only "a little flour" and does not say when to add it. If using flour, cooking it in the butter with the celery at the start rather than stirring it in raw at the end avoids lumps; roughly two tablespoons to this quantity gives body without paste.
- SippetsSmall triangles or cubes of bread, toasted or fried in butter, served alongside or floated on top. Croutons in all but name.
- YieldAs written it makes about five pints and serves eight as a first course. The "probable cost, 10d. per pint" is a period retail note, not an instruction.
Celery is generally said to have reached English kitchens as a cultivated vegetable in the later seventeenth century, and was for a long time a luxury: the pale, tender stalks the recipe calls for were produced by trenching and earthing up the plants to exclude light, slow work that made good celery a winter delicacy sold by the head. Cream soups built on a white stock and finished with cream were a fixture of the nineteenth-century dinner table, and it is often said that a pale soup and a brown soup were offered side by side so guests could choose.