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Eggs and Celery
Put into a stewpan four heads of celery that have been previously cut into short pieces, and boiled till nearly done in salt and water. Stew the celery for five minutes with three table-spoonfuls of cream and half a table-spoonful of vinegar. Season according to taste with salt and white pepper. Place the celery on a dish, and serve poached eggs neatly on the top of it. Garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs. Time, half an hour or more to boil celery. Sufficient for five or six poached eggs. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A light supper dish of the sort Victorian cookery books filed under vegetable entrées. It hangs on two things: not overcooking the celery, and not splitting the cream.
- "Four heads of celery"A head is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Victorian celery is likely to have been stringier than modern blanched varieties, so two large supermarket heads, trimmed and peeled of their coarsest strings, is probably closer to the intended quantity than four.
- Boil "till nearly done"The half hour given suits tougher, older celery. Cut into 2-inch lengths, modern celery is tender in 8 to 12 minutes of simmering in salted water. Stop while it still has some bite, since it gets five more minutes in the cream.
- Keeping the cream from splittingThis is the hinge. Half a tablespoon of vinegar in three of cream will curdle if the pan is hot and boiling. Stew the celery in the cream over low heat first, then stir the vinegar in at the very end, off the direct heat. Use double or heavy cream, not single or half-and-half, which breaks readily with acid.
- Drain the celery wellThree tablespoons of cream is a very small amount of sauce. Any boiling water clinging to the celery will thin it to nothing, so drain thoroughly and let the steam escape for a moment before it goes into the stewpan.
- White pepperUsually chosen so black flecks do not show in a pale dish. Black pepper can be substituted, though the flavour is not identical.
- PoachingBarely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, 3 minutes for a soft yolk. Poach them last and lift them onto the celery straight from the water, blotted on a cloth, or the sauce will be watery.
- Yield and servingFive or six poached eggs feeds three as a light main or five or six as a first course. It wants toast or a bread roll alongside; there is nothing starchy in the dish itself.
- "Probable cost, 1s. 3d."One shilling and threepence, a pre-decimal price from the book's own era and of no use as a modern guide. Cassell's gave probable costings throughout.
Celery appears in English kitchens in the seventeenth century, the cultivated blanched forms generally said to have come by way of Italy, valued first as a medicinal plant and a flavouring for soups and only later eaten as a vegetable in its own right. By the 1870s, when Cassell's Dictionary was assembled, it was a winter staple of the British kitchen garden, blanched by earthing up the stems so they grew pale and mild, and it appears through the book stewed, creamed, made into sauce, and served raw in a glass on the dinner table. A dish of this kind would have suited a meatless day, or the lighter supper or luncheon course between the substantial meals. The vinegar here does the work a squeeze of lemon does in a modern version, cutting the cream so the dish does not read as merely rich.