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Stewed Celery
Take about six sticks of nice white celery.
Cut the tops off, leaving it five or six inches in length. Stir in some good second stock till quite tender; take out the celery and thicken the stock into a nice brown sauce; season with pepper and salt, and pour it over the celery and serve quite hot.
Tomates à la Française.
Choose some small round tomatoes, skin them and take out the core; fill in the middle with minced anchovies and mayonnaise; place a sprig of tarragon on the top, and dip each tomato in aspic two or three times till quite coated. Put a round piece of aspic on the top like a lid.
N2 Tomates en Feuilletage.
Ingredients.
Four ounces of Puff Pastry.
Three sliced Tomatoes.
One teaspoonful of good Vinegar.
One teaspoonful of Anchovy Sauce.
One chopped Shalot.
One small Onion.
Stir these sauces carefully together in one gill of salad oil as for mayonnaise; lay in it the slices of tomatoes. Set them on the ice till cool or cold. Roll out some puff pastry, spread the tomatoes over it, dust one tablespoonful of grated cheese over that. Roll out a piece of pastry and lay on the top, press it together, cut it out and bake.
The page runs three recipes together, and the printing is rough: "Stir in some good second stock" is almost certainly "Stew it in." Read it that way and the celery dish makes sense.
- Second stockThe weaker liquid drawn from bones already boiled once for first stock. A light, unsalted chicken or veal stock stands in for it; avoid anything heavily reduced, since you will be reducing it again for the sauce.
- "Six sticks" is ambiguous"stick" has been used both for a single rib and, loosely, for a whole blanched head, and the recipe does not settle which is meant. Six ribs trimmed to five or six inches is the sensible modern reading.
- Cooking the celeryBarely cover the trimmed ribs with stock and simmer, lid ajar, 20-30 minutes until a knife slides through without resistance. Braising in a shallow pan rather than boiling in a deep one keeps the pieces intact and concentrates the stock as it goes.
- "Thicken into a nice brown sauce"The period method is a brown roux — butter and flour cooked to hazelnut colour — whisked into the strained cooking liquid, or a spoonful of beurre manié stirred in off the boil. Reduce the stock first if it tastes thin; there is no other seasoning here beyond pepper and salt.
- Aspic for the tomatoesCommercial aspic powder or a well-clarified stock set with gelatine both work. The coating only builds if the aspic is syrupy and the tomatoes are cold, so chill the filled tomatoes hard and dip, chill, dip again.
- A gillOne gill is five imperial fluid ounces, a little over half a US cup. That is the oil quantity for the tomato dressing in the pastry recipe.
- The dressing is not a mayonnaise"As for mayonnaise" describes the technique — dribble the oil into the vinegar, anchovy sauce, shallot and onion while whisking — but with no egg yolk it will not emulsify permanently. Expect a thick vinaigrette that needs re-whisking.
- Baking the feuilletageNo oven is given. Puff pastry needs 425F, dropping to 375F once it has risen, roughly 20-25 minutes; the filling is already cold and wet, so drain the tomato slices well or the base will not crisp.
- Anchovy sauceThe bottled Victorian condiment, still sold in Britain. A teaspoon of anchovy paste thinned with a little vinegar is the closest substitute.
Blanched white celery was a winter luxury in Britain from the eighteenth century onward, grown in earthed-up trenches to keep the stalks pale and mild, and served often enough at table to justify the tall cut-glass celery vases that survive in quantity from the period. Cooked celery — stewed, braised, or sauced — was far commoner on Victorian menus than it is now, and appears here in the plainest French manner: stewed in stock, the stock thickened and returned to it. The two tomato dishes crowded onto the same page belong to a different fashion entirely, the late-century vogue for cold, aspic-glazed entrées and savouries. That a book called High Class Cookery Recipes sets a simple braise beside anchovy-stuffed tomatoes coated in jelly says something about what "high class" meant in the late nineteenth century: not elaboration everywhere, but knowing which dish took the trouble.