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Some Kitchen Kinks: Stewed
Stewed Celery.
To blanch celery in cooking, remove all the leaves from the stalks. Scrape off all rusted or dark spots, cut into pieces about 3 inches long, and put in cold water. Have a stewpan of boiling water on the fire, wash and drain the celery and put in the boiling water. Add one teaspoonful of salt for every 2 quarts of water. Boil rapidly for fifteen minutes, having the cover partially off the stewpan. Pour off the water and rinse with cold water, then drain.
The celery is now ready to finish in the following manner: Put the celery in the stewpan with one tablespoonful of butter, and one teaspoonful of salt for each quart of celery.
Cover and cook slowly for fifteen minutes. Shake the pan frequently while the celery is cooking. Serve hot.
Onion. This vegetable is the most useful of all our flavorers, and there is hardly a soup, stew, sauce, etc., that is not improved by the addition of the onion flavor. As a vegetable the onion may be prepared in a variety of ways. The white onions are the most delicate and are therefore more suitable as a vegetable than the yellow or red variety. The large Spanish onions and the Bermuda onion are also delicate and suitable for a table vegetable. If the stronger onions are used for this purpose they must be thoroughly blanched.
A two-stage vegetable treatment: a hard boil to soften and tame the celery, then a slow butter braise. The second stage is where the dish is made or lost.
- "Blanch" here means a full boilIn older usage, blanching vegetables often meant boiling them outright rather than the brief dip we mean today. Fifteen minutes at a rolling boil is what the recipe intends.
- Lid partially offThe recipe does not say why, but the usual explanation for venting a pan of boiled vegetables is that trapped volatile acids dull the colour and sharpen the flavour.
- Timings for modern celeryToday's celery is generally more tender than older field celery, so start checking at eight minutes and stop when a knife slides in with slight resistance, then proceed to the butter stage.
- The butter stage is the hingeCook slowly with the lid on and shake often. There is no added liquid, so the celery is steaming in its own moisture and butter; over high heat it scorches and the butter breaks. Low heat, frequent movement.
- Salt quantitiesA teaspoon of salt per quart of blanched celery in the second stage is heavy by current taste, especially since the celery was already boiled in salted water. Half that, then adjust at the table.
- Measuring celery by the quartVolume measure for cut vegetables was normal then. A quart of 3-inch pieces is roughly one large head, or about a pound trimmed, and serves three or four as a side.
- The onion noteThe distinction between mild and strong onions still holds, though the named varieties have shifted. Bermuda onions are now largely absorbed into the general "sweet onion" category; Vidalia, Walla Walla or a large Spanish onion all serve the purpose.
- Blanching strong onionsFor yellow or red onions served as a vegetable rather than a flavouring, a few minutes in boiling water drives off the harsh sulphur compounds. Drain well before finishing in butter, or the dish turns watery.
Stewed and creamed celery was a standard American side dish in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when celery was a considerably grander vegetable than it is now. Grown in trenches and hand-blanched in the field by banking soil or paper around the stalks to keep them pale, it was labour-intensive enough to be sold in specialist glass celery vases and set out on the table as a delicacy in its own right; Kalamazoo, Michigan built a genuine reputation on it. The recipe's opening instruction to scrape off "rusted or dark spots" belongs to that world of soil-blanched stalks, which arrived from the greengrocer marked by the earth they grew in. The book's tacked-on paragraph about onions reflects the format of these household compendiums, where vegetable notes and cooking directions ran together in a single column with no clear line between reference entry and recipe.