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Celery, with White Sauce
Prepare the celery as for stewing, let it stew in salt and water for ten minutes, then drain it, and just cover it with a little veal broth; stew it again till tender. As the broth boils away, add a little milk. When the celery is sufficiently cooked, arrange it on a hot dish, thicken the gravy with a little flour and butter, season it lightly with salt and pepper, and pour it over the celery. Time, one hour or more. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. per head. Sufficient, one head for two persons.
A plain Victorian braise that still works: celery cooked in stock until it collapses into sweetness, sauced with the reduced cooking liquid. The instructions assume a cook who knows what "prepare as for stewing" involves.
- Preparing the celeryTrim the root and the leafy tops, separate or halve the head lengthwise, wash grit out from between the ribs, and peel the stringy outer stalks with a swivel peeler. Cut into lengths of three or four inches; bundles tied with string hold their shape and are easier to lift out whole.
- The hinge: don't lose the liquidThe dish depends on the broth reducing to a small, concentrated amount that becomes the sauce. Use a wide pan with the celery in one layer, liquid barely covering, and top up with milk as instructed rather than starting with a flood of stock you then have to boil away.
- Veal brothVeal stock is rarely sold now. A light chicken stock is the nearest thing in body and neutrality; a vegetable stock works but gives a thinner sauce. Avoid a dark beef stock, which will overwhelm the celery.
- The ten-minute blanchThe initial boil in salted water was probably meant to soften older, coarser winter celery and take the edge off any bitterness. Modern celery is generally milder, so a shorter blanch is likely enough, and with tender hearts you can go straight to the braise.
- Timing"One hour or more" reflects tough field celery. Braised at a bare simmer, modern celery hearts are tender at 25 to 40 minutes depending on thickness. Test with a knife tip at the base of the rib, which cooks last.
- ThickeningWork equal weights of soft butter and flour into a paste (beurre manié), add it to the bubbling gravy in small pieces, whisking, and let it boil a minute to cook out the flour. About 15 g of each will thicken 250 ml of liquid to a coating sauce.
- Cost and yieldThe "2d. to 4d. per head" is a price note for the Victorian housekeeper, not an ingredient. One head for two people holds up if you are serving it as a side; heads sold today are large, so allow one for three or four alongside a roast.
Cassell's places this among the plain vegetable entries of a book aimed at middle-class households with a cook and a tight weekly budget, hence the costing in pence per head. Celery was a winter vegetable in nineteenth-century Britain, grown in trenches and earthed up to blanch the stalks white, and it reached the table either raw in a celery glass or stewed like this. Cooked celery was taken seriously in a way it no longer is. The technique here — blanch, braise in a little broth, then thicken the reduced liquor with flour and butter — is the standard English treatment of a hard vegetable, and the finishing paste of flour and butter stirred into the pan is what French cookery calls beurre manié.