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Celery Sauce
Cut the celery in pieces about an inch long, boil in milk till tender, then mash it up, add cream and a little butter.
— Mrs. Charles A. Chapman
A terse village receipt that assumes you already know what celery sauce is for: boiled or roast poultry, and above all boiled turkey. The quantities are left entirely to the cook, so here is a working set.
- Working proportionsTwo cups of sliced celery (about one large head of inner ribs) to one cup of milk gives roughly 1 1/2 cups of sauce, enough for four to six servings. Finish with 1/4 cup cream and a tablespoon of butter.
- The hinge: milk scorchesCelery needs 15-20 minutes to go truly tender, and milk left over direct heat that long will catch on the bottom of the pan and taint the whole sauce. Use a heavy pan on low heat, stir often, or set the pan in a wider pan of simmering water.
- Take the strings offCelery of the period was generally stringier than today's self-blanching heads, though this varied. Either way, peel the outer ribs or use only the pale inner ones; mashing will not break down a string, and the sauce should be smooth.
- Mash means mashBefore blenders this would have been done with a wooden masher or by pressing through a sieve, which gives a slightly rough, flecked sauce. A brief pulse with a stick blender comes closer to that than a full puree, which turns it pale and pasty.
- Season it yourselfNo salt or pepper is mentioned, as was common in these compressed receipts. Salt at the end, after the cream, and add white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg if you want the version that appears in fuller cookbooks of the period.
- If it is thinThe receipt relies on the mashed celery for body, which makes a loose sauce. Fuller period versions of celery sauce are commonly thickened with flour worked into the butter and stirred in at the finish; that is in keeping with the style and fixes the consistency.
- Serve hot, at onceHard reheating can split the cream and dulls the celery. Make it while the bird rests and send it to the table straight from the pan.
Celery sauce was a standard English and American accompaniment to boiled fowl and boiled turkey through the nineteenth century, filling much the same role that bread sauce did for roast birds. Celery was a winter vegetable of some standing: blanched in trenches or stored in sand in the cellar, it kept for weeks and was one of the few fresh-tasting things available at a Christmas or New Year table. The receipt's brevity is characteristic of church and village collections, whose contributors wrote for neighbors who had made the dish before. Celery was fashionable enough in mid-century America to have its own pressed-glass serving vases; cooked celery sauces became less common as the vegetable itself became an everyday raw one.