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Cream of Celery Soup
2 cups White Stock II or III 3 cups celery, cut in inch pieces 2 cups boiling water 1 slice onion 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk 1 cup cream Salt Pepper Parboil celery in water ten minutes; drain, add stock, cook until celery is soft, and rub through sieve. Scald onion in milk, remove onion, add milk to stock, bind, add cream, and season with salt and pepper.
A classic velouté-style cream soup: celery cooked in stock, sieved, then thickened and enriched. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the book's basic methods, so two terms need unpacking before you start.
- "Bind" means make a rouxThe butter and flour listed but never mentioned in the method are the binding agent. Melt the 2 tablespoons butter, stir in the 3 tablespoons flour, cook a minute or two without colouring, then whisk in the hot celery-stock-milk mixture off the heat and return it to a simmer until it thickens.
- White Stock II or IIIA cross-reference to the stock chapter — a light veal or chicken stock. Any good low-sodium chicken stock stands in. If you use a salted commercial stock, hold back on the salt until the end.
- The parboil is deliberateTen minutes in boiling water, then drained, strips out the strongest raw-celery bitterness. Older, coarser winter celery needed it more than the tender stalks sold now, but the step still gives a rounder flavour. Do not skip the draining and expect the same soup.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the usual route to smoothness in this period. A blender is faster, but celery is fibrous — pass the puree through a fine sieve afterwards anyway if you want the texture the recipe intends.
- Scalding the onionBring the milk just to the point where it steams and bubbles at the edge with the onion slice in it, then lift the onion out. This is flavour infusion, not cooking; boiling the milk hard will give it a cooked, slightly scorched taste.
- Cream goes in last, off the boilOnce the cream is added, keep the soup below a simmer. A flour-bound soup this rich can catch on the pan bottom or separate if pushed to a hard boil.
- Quantity of celeryThree cups cut in inch lengths is a good part of a head, outer stalks included. The leaves carry a good deal of flavour and can go in with the stock, then be sieved out with everything else.
- YieldAbout six cups of finished soup — four to six servings. Salt and pepper at the very end, after the cream, when the seasoning can be judged properly.
Cream soups of this construction — a vegetable puree let down with stock and milk, held together with a butter-and-flour binding and finished with cream — were the backbone of the American cooking-school curriculum in the decades around 1900. The method was taught as a formula rather than a set of individual recipes: master the proportions of roux to liquid and you could produce cream of celery, of asparagus, of pea or of corn by swapping the vegetable, which is why this entry can lean on "bind" and a numbered stock recipe without further explanation. Celery itself was a fashionable and comparatively expensive vegetable in this period, often served raw in special tall glass vases at the table as a mark of a well-set dinner; using a whole head for soup was a modest luxury, and the parboiling step reflects the coarser, stronger-flavoured celery of the day.