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Stewed Celery a la Creme
Wash very clean 2 heads of celery, trim them neatly, cutting off the outer stalks, the leaves, and the tops; cut in desired lengths, and boil them in salt and water until tender. Drain them and put them in a dish. Have ready in another saucepan a breakfast-cupful of good cream. Let it boil, with a piece of butter rolled in flour, till it is thick and smooth; then pour it over the celery, grate a little nutmeg over the top, and serve. Time to boil the celery, from three-quarters of an hour to one hour and a half. Sufficient for four persons.
A straightforward cream-sauced vegetable dish, with one number that modern cooks should ignore: the boiling time.
- The boiling timeThree-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half will reduce trimmed celery to strings and mush. Modern celery, grown tender, needs 8-15 minutes in salted water depending on thickness; test with a knife tip and drain the moment it yields.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8-10 fl oz. Use 1 cup of cream and add a little more if the sauce tightens too far.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre mani\, kumbled together raw, about 1 tablespoon butter to 1 tablespoon flour. Whisk it into the simmering cream in small pieces so it disperses, and let it cook a couple of minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- Cream that boilsHeavy cream (36% fat or more) will hold a boil; light cream or half-and-half is liable to break. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir.
- TrimmingTwo heads means two whole bunches. The discarded outer stalks, leaves and tops are worth keeping for stock rather than the bin.
- Drain thoroughlyCelery holds a great deal of water. Let it sit in the colander a minute or blot it, or the sauce will thin out on the plate.
- NutmegGrate it as late as possible; the aroma of freshly grated nutmeg fades fairly quickly, so it is best done just before the dish goes out (the recipe has it grated over the top immediately before serving).
- YieldFour as a side dish, as the recipe states. Like most cream-sauced vegetables it is best served straight away.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in the nineteenth century: labour-intensive to blanch and earth up, served in specialised glass celery vases, and often appearing raw on the dinner table as much as an ornament as a dish to eat. Cooking it in a cream sauce, with nutmeg, follows the older English pattern for boiled vegetables enriched at the last moment with cream thickened by butter and flour rather than by reduction — a treatment also given to vegetables such as onions, salsify and sea kale in cookbooks of the period. The "à la crème" tag was applied liberally in Anglo-American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century to lend a French gloss to what was, in practice, a plain white sauce made with cream instead of milk.