Home › Menu V › Celery Cheese Toast
Celery Cheese Toast
Make above recipe for Celery Sauce, adding 1 cup grated cheese when celery is added. Stir until cheese is melted. Add 1/2 1/2 teaspoon table sauce, then add 1 egg yolk and 2/3 cup cream as above and cook over hot water 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Serve on Toast or crackers. 1 egg white beaten stiff may be added just before serving.
A cheese-enriched celery cream sauce spooned over toast — essentially a rarebit built on a vegetable base. It depends entirely on the Celery Sauce recipe printed just above it in the book, which is a milk-thickened white sauce with cooked celery folded in.
- Keep it below a simmerThis is the hinge. Once the cheese and the egg yolk are in, the sauce must not boil: the cheese will string and weep fat and the yolk will curdle. That is exactly why the original moves the pan over hot water for the final two minutes.
- "Cook over hot water"A double boiler, or a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. The water should not touch the bowl and should not be at a rolling boil.
- "Table sauce"A bottled brown condiment of the period — Worcestershire is the safest modern reading, though A-1 or a similar steak sauce fits the term equally well. Half a teaspoon is there for salt and tang, not for flavour you can identify.
- The cheeseA cup grated means about 4 oz. A mild factory cheddar or "American" cheese is the likeliest period reading; a young cheddar melts smoothly here. Aged cheddar and hard grating cheeses are likelier to separate at this low heat.
- CreamPeriod "cream" for cooking was generally lighter than today's heavy cream, nearer what we would call light cream. Heavy cream works and makes a richer sauce; whole milk will thin it noticeably.
- Tempering the yolkBeat the yolk into the cream first, then add the mixture to the hot sauce in a thin stream while stirring, rather than dropping the yolk in whole.
- The beaten egg whiteOptional in the original. Folded in at the end it lightens the sauce, and it is the reason the dish must go to the table immediately. Note that the white is not cooked at that point; use pasteurized eggs if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Yield and servingServing -- Have the toast made and hot before the sauce is finished, not after.
The book is Alice Bradley's For Luncheon and Supper Guests (1922); Bradley ran Miss Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston after Fannie Farmer's death and wrote for Woman's Home Companion. Dishes like this one belong to a very specific American institution: the ladies' luncheon, where a hostess needed something hot, rich, and quick that could be assembled from a white sauce and whatever was in the pantry. Melted-cheese-on-toast preparations were everywhere in that era, generally traced back to Welsh rabbit and popularised by the chafing dish, which let the cook finish the sauce at the table over a spirit lamp — the same gentle indirect heat the "over hot water" instruction is protecting. The bottled "table sauce" is a period fingerprint: by the 1920s Worcestershire and its imitators were standard American cupboard items, and cookbooks referred to them generically, expecting the reader to reach for whichever bottle she owned.