Celery Sauce
Ingredients.
Four heads of Celery.
Four ounces of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour.
One pint of Milk.
One gill of Cream.
A little Nutmeg, Pepper, and Salt.
Clean the celery very thoroughly, and slice it up very thinly, put it into a stewpan with the butter, nutmeg, pepper, and salt. Let it stew slowly until the celery is dissolved: it will take some time, and it must not brown. When it has dissolved, stir in the flour, mix it well, then stir in the milk and boil it for twenty minutes. Rub it through a hair-sieve, warm it up again, stir in the cream, and serve.
A classic velouté-style purée sauce, meant for boiled fowl or turkey. The whole thing turns on the slow sweat at the start.
- Do not let it colourThe celery must soften in butter without browning — cover the pan, keep the heat very low, and expect 30-45 minutes. Any colour in the butter turns the finished sauce grey-beige instead of pale ivory, and pushes the flavour towards roasted rather than sweet.
- "Four heads of celery"Celery of this period was often a slender blanched bunch, likely smaller than a modern supermarket head, so four heads need not mean four modern ones. Two large modern heads, trimmed of the coarsest outer ribs, is a reasonable starting point — roughly 1.5 lb / 700 g of sliced celery.
- A gillFive fluid ounces, about 140 ml — a generous half cup. The pint of milk is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz / 570 ml, not the American 16.
- StewpanA heavy-bottomed saucepan with a lid. Weight matters here more than usual, since the celery sits on low heat for a long stretch.
- Boiling twenty minutesThat is a long simmer for a milk sauce and it will catch if left alone. Stir often, keep it at a bare tremble, and use the time to cook out the raw flour taste.
- The sieveA hair sieve was the fine-mesh standard of the period. A fine chinois with a ladle worked round the inside does the same job; a blender first, then the sieve, removes the celery strings faster and with less loss.
- Cream at the endAdd it off the boil and warm through only; further boiling risks splitting it.
- YieldPerhaps a pint and a quarter to a pint and a half of finished sauce, depending on how much is lost at the sieve — enough to serve a good many alongside a boiled chicken or turkey. It thickens considerably on standing; loosen with a little hot milk.
Celery sauce belongs to the British repertoire of white sauces served with boiled poultry, and recipes for it appear in English cookery books from the late eighteenth century onward, by which time celery was an established kitchen-garden vegetable. Its usual partners were boiled turkey or a boiled fowl — dishes that wanted a sauce with body and sweetness to redeem an otherwise plain bird — and period menus often offer it alongside bread sauce or oyster sauce as the alternative choice. The method here, sweating a vegetable to collapse in butter before building a roux around it, is the same technique behind onion (soubise) sauce. The instruction to rub it through a hair sieve is a reminder of how much of that refinement was hand labour.