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Some Kitchen Kinks: Celeriac
Celeriac.-This vegetable is also known as "knot celery" and "turniprooted celery." The roots, which are not the stalks are eaten. They are more often used as a vegetable than as a salad.
Pare the celeriac, cut in thin, narrow slices, and put into cold water. Drain from this water and drop into boiling water and boil thirty minutes.
Drain and rinse with cold water. The celeriac is now ready to be prepared and served the same as celery.
Puree of Celeriac. 1 quart celeriac cut in dice. 2 tablespoonfuls butter. 1 tablespoonful flour. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 gill stock or cream.
Cook the celeriac thirty minutes in boiling water, rinse in cold water, then press through a purée sieve.
Put the butter in a saucepan and on the fire. When hot add the flour and stir until smooth and frothy, and then add the strained celeriac and cook five minutes, stirring frequently.
Add the salt and stock or cream and cook five minutes longer. If the purée seems dry, add more stock or cream. The vegetable varies as to the amount of moisture it requires.
It should be eaten very hot. If used as a garnish, it is generally put in the center of the dish and the poultry or meat placed on it or around it.
Otherwise it may be served on toast or fried bread as a dish by itself.
Two preparations in one entry: plain boiled celeriac to be treated like celery, and a buttery purée to serve under roast meat. A few of the instructions reflect a period taste for very soft vegetables.
- Keep it out of the airCut celeriac browns within minutes, which is why the original drops the slices into cold water before cooking. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar in that water keeps the flesh pale.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Have more stock or cream than that on hand — the recipe itself notes the vegetable varies in moisture, and a dry purée will need topping up.
- A quart of diced celeriacRoughly 1 to 1¼ lb of peeled root, which means one large bulb or two small ones. Peel generously; the outer layer is fibrous and knobbly and rarely softens.
- Thirty minutes is too longDiced celeriac is tender at 12 to 15 minutes in salted boiling water, and thin slices in under 10. The long boil may have suited a purée sieve, which wants the vegetable falling apart; a food mill or ricer does not.
- Purée sievePurée sieve -- A food mill with the medium plate, or a potato ricer. A blender or food processor will also work, though some cooks find the result slacker in texture.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons butter to one of flour is a loose, fat-heavy roux by design — it enriches rather than thickens. Cook it until it foams and smells nutty, about a minute, before the purée goes in.
- Skip the cold rinse for the puréeSkip the cold rinse for the purée -- The cold rinse may have suited pressing the vegetable through a sieve by hand. If you are pressing it hot into a hot pan, drain it well and move on; the dish is meant to be eaten very hot.
- YieldAbout 3 cups of purée, enough for four as a side or a bed for a roast bird.
Celeriac is the swollen hypocotyl of a cultivated form of the same species as stalk celery, Apium graveolens, selected for root rather than stem; it is generally traced to northern European and Mediterranean gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and became a staple in German, Dutch and French cooking long before it was familiar in American kitchens. That unfamiliarity may well be why this entry opens with a definition and two alternative names ot assassume a reader had ever seen one, and had to explain that the part eaten is the root, not the stalks. The pur erree treatment, thinned with stock and set beneath roast meat or spread on fried bread, follows the French pattern for root vegetables, where a smooth pur erre served as both sauce and garnish on the same plate.