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Celery Sauce
3 cups celery, cut in thin slices 2 cups Thin White Sauce Wash and scrape celery before cutting into pieces. Cook in boiling salted water until soft, drain, rub through a sieve, and add to sauce. Celery sauce is often made from the stock in which fowl or turkey has been boiled, or with one-half stock and one-half milk.
A straightforward purée sauce whose success depends entirely on cooking the celery until it is genuinely soft — anything short of that leaves fibrous threads that no sieve will catch.
- Thin White SauceIn books of this period thin white sauce is one tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk, cooked out for a minute or two before the milk goes in and seasoned with salt and white pepper. Two cups therefore means 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 2 cups milk.
- Cut the celery smallThree cups of thin slices is roughly a medium to large head, trimmed. Slicing across the rib shortens the strings, which matters more here than looks, since everything is going through a sieve.
- Cook it further than you thinkBoil 15–20 minutes, not the 8–10 that would leave celery pleasantly tender as a vegetable. Underdone celery purées into a stringy mass rather than a smooth one.
- Sieve or blenderA food mill or blender does the work of the sieve faster, but blended celery still needs straining through a fine sieve to catch the fibres. Skipping that step is the difference between a sauce and a pulp.
- The stock versionMade with poultry stock in place of some or all of the milk, the sauce is thinner and more savoury; use well-skimmed stock or the fat will separate out on standing. The recipe offers half stock, half milk as an alternative to all stock.
- Season at the endThe boiling water and the purée both dilute the sauce's seasoning, and stock may already be salted. Taste after the purée goes in, not before.
- YieldAbout two and a half to three cups. The recipe gives no yield; this is enough sauce for a boiled fowl for six to eight.
Celery sauce belonged to the standard English and American repertoire for boiled poultry through the nineteenth century, appearing alongside bread sauce and egg sauce as an accompaniment to a boiled fowl or turkey. The recipe's alternative of using the broth in which the bird was boiled ties the sauce to the dish it dresses, though the celery here is cooked separately in salted water rather than lifted from the pot. Celery was a comparatively costly vegetable in this period, sold in bunches and often served raw in celery glasses at table. The instruction to "wash and scrape" suggests coarser, stringier celery than is usual in the market now.