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Celery Sauce
Separate stalks from 2 roots celery and wash thoroughly. Cut lengthwise and crosswise in small pieces. There should be 1 1/3 cups. Put in saucepan with 3 cups water and 1 teaspoon salt and cook 20 minutes or until tender. Drain, reserving both liquid and celery. To Liquid add Chicken stock to make 2 cups or Water to make 2 cups and 1 chicken bouillon cube. Melt in saucepan, chafing dish or electric grill 3 tablespoons butter. Add 3 tablespoons flour mixed with 3/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper. Stir until smooth and add the 2 cups celery water and chicken stock. Stir and boil 1 minute. Add Cooked celery and bring to boiling point. Mix 1 egg yolk and 2/3 cup cream. Add to first mixture and cook 2 minutes over hot water, stirring constantly.
A chicken-stock velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, built to be held and served from a chafing dish. The liaison is the whole point of failure.
- Do not boil after the yolk goes inOnce the egg yolk and cream are added the sauce must stay below a simmer or the yolk will curdle into threads. The instruction to cook it "over hot water" means a double boiler or a bowl set over barely steaming water, not direct heat.
- "2 roots celery"A root here is a whole head or bunch, not the celeriac root. Two heads gives far more than the 1 1/3 cups called for, so trust the cup measure and save the rest.
- Cooking timeThe recipe allows "20 minutes or until tender." Celery cut this small is often tender in 8 to 12 minutes; cooked much longer it collapses into the sauce instead of staying in pieces.
- SaltThe celery is boiled in a teaspoon of salt, the roux carries another 3/4 teaspoon, and a bouillon cube adds a good deal more. If you use a cube rather than homemade stock, hold back the roux salt and season at the end.
- Chafing dish and electric grillThe chafing dish was a fashionable tableside appliance of the period. "Electric grill" in this period more likely means a small flat electric hotplate than a broiler, though the book does not say. The recipe lists an ordinary saucepan first, so any heavy pan works.
- Roux proportionThree tablespoons each butter and flour to two cups liquid, plus 2/3 cup cream, falls between a thin and a medium white sauce; the yolk adds a little body as it stands. Thin with a little extra stock if it sets too stiff before serving.
- Yield and servingClose to four cups by the recipe's own measures. Traditionally spooned over boiled or roast fowl, turkey, or poached fish; it also works over toast points or as a base for creamed chicken.
Celery sauce was a fixture of English and American cookery through the nineteenth century, usually paired with boiled poultry, turkey or game birds. The version here, from a book of luncheon and supper dishes, reflects the early twentieth-century vogue for cooking at the table: a chafing dish or an electric hotplate let a hostess finish a delicate egg-thickened sauce in the dining room. The finishing liaison of egg yolk and cream is straightforward French technique, the same move that turns a velouté into a sauce allemande.