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Celery, to Fry
Cold boiled celery will answer for this purpose. Split three or four heads, and dip the pieces into clarified butter, and fry them until they are lightly browned; lay them on some blotting-paper for a minute to drain off the fat, and pile them like sugar biscuits on a napkin. Garnish the dish prettily with parsley. They may be dipped in batter before frying, and served with melted butter, or with good brown sauce made with the gravy in which they were boiled. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost. 2d. to 4d. per head. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian way of using up yesterday's boiled celery: the heads are dipped in fat, fried, drained and stacked on a folded napkin. The key is that the celery is already fully cooked, so frying is only for colour and crispness.
- Start with cooked celeryThe recipe assumes you already have heads of celery boiled and cooled, drained and patted dry. Wet celery will spit in the fat and refuse to brown; press the pieces between towels first.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it can be heated harder without burning. Melt unsalted butter gently, skim the foam and pour off the clear fat, leaving the milky sediment behind. Shop-bought ghee is close, though it is cooked longer so the solids brown and it tastes nuttier.
- Dipping, not deep-frying"Dip the pieces into clarified butter" appears to mean coating them before they go into the pan, which amounts to a shallow fry in butter. Keep the heat moderate; clarified butter is usually given a smoke point somewhere around 450-485F, and celery browns well below that.
- Ten minutes is generousAlready-boiled celery only needs colour. Three to five minutes in a hot pan, turning once, will brown it; ten minutes at any real heat will darken the butter and collapse the stalks to strings.
- Blotting-paperKitchen paper or a rack over a tray. Blotting paper was the ordinary Victorian household absorbent and was used routinely for draining fried food.
- "Piled like sugar biscuits""Pile them like sugar biscuits" -- A period plating instruction: heaped up on a napkin laid in the dish. A warmed plate with a paper liner does the same job.
- The batter variationIf battering, use a thin coating batter and a deeper pan of neutral oil at 350-375F rather than butter, which will burn before the batter sets.
- The sauce"Good brown sauce made with the gravy in which they were boiled" means the celery cooking liquid worked up into a brown sauce. A simple reduction of the cooking water with stock, a little roux and a spoon of sherry answers well.
- Cost and yield2d. to 4d. per head is twopence to fourpence, pre-decimal pence. Three or four heads served five or six as a side dish.
Celery reached British kitchens as a cultivated vegetable in the seventeenth century and by the Victorian period was a staple of the winter table, banked up with earth in trenches to blanch the stalks white and sweet. Cassell's treats it as an all-purpose vegetable rather than a raw garnish, with entries for boiling, stewing, saucing and, here, frying the leftovers. That last point is the real character of the book: a large household boiled celery for dinner and expected the cold remainder to reappear the following day in a different guise, browned in butter and dressed up on a napkin so that nobody need remark on its origins. The folded napkin under fried food, and the pyramid arrangement, were standard service conventions of the period.