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Celery Soup
Five heads celery, one pint good soup stock, three pints water, one-half pint cream or rich milk. Cut the celery small, put on with the water and cook until tender. Take out celery and rub through strainer. Add to the soup stock and cook one hour slowly. the milk and stir into it one tablespoon of flour and one of butter rubbed smooth. Pour into the celery, let get very hot and serve.
— Mrs. Wm. H. Van Orden
A straightforward cream-of-celery built on stock and a butter-flour thickening, from an era when celery came in large, strong-flavored bunches. A few conversions and one point of technique will bring it into a modern kitchen.
- "Five heads" of celeryA head is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Older celery varieties, blanched rather than self-blanching, are generally reckoned to have been stronger-flavoured than modern pale supermarket stalks, so two to three large modern bunches, leaves included, is a reasonable substitution.
- VolumesOne pint is 2 cups, three pints is 6 cups, half a pint is 1 cup. Total liquid is about 2 1/4 quarts (9 cups) before reduction, enough for roughly six servings.
- Rubbing through a strainerThis is the purée step, done in the days before blenders. A food mill or an immersion blender does the same work in a fraction of the time; pass the result through a sieve afterward if you want to catch the stringy fibers, which celery has in quantity.
- The hour of slow cookingThe recipe simmers the purée with the stock for an hour, which will marry the flavours and reduce the liquid somewhat. A shorter simmer of about forty minutes will generally do if your stock is already well flavoured.
- The thickeningButter and flour rubbed smooth is beurre manié, worked into the hot milk rather than cooked as a roux. Whisk it in off the heat or over low heat and let it cook a minute or two, or the soup will taste of raw flour.
- Do not let it boil after the cream goes inDo not let it boil hard after the milk or cream goes in -- Dairy added at the end can curdle if boiled, though the flour in the liaison offers some protection. "Let get very hot" is best read as bringing it just short of a simmer.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified; community-cookbook receipts routinely left it to the cook. Taste and correct at the end, after the dairy, when the volume is final.
Celery was a market-garden crop of some prestige in the late nineteenth century, grown in trenches and blanched with boards or banked soil, and it appeared on American tables in cut-glass celery vases as a course in itself. Cream soups of this kind belong to the same period, when the domestic-science movement was standardizing the milk-and-flour liaison that turns any cooked vegetable into a smooth first course. A community cookbook like this one gathered such receipts from the household cooks who actually made them, which is why the instructions assume you already know how much salt you like and how hot "very hot" is. The attribution to a named contributor is the standard form for these subscription volumes, which were often sold to raise funds for a church, library or village improvement society.