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Vegetables: Stewed
Stewed Celery.
Remove the leaves from the stalks.
Scrape rusted or dark spots, cut into pieces three inches long, and put in boiling water. Add 1 teaspoonful salt for 2 quarts water. Boil rapidly fifteen minutes. Pour off the water, rinse with cold water, then drain.
Finish in the following manner: Put the celery in the stewpan with 1 tablespoonful butter, and 1 teaspoonful salt for each quart celery. Cover, and cook slowly for fifteen minutes.
Shake the pan frequently while the celery is cooking. Serve hot. -MARIA PARLOA.
Boiled Onions in White Sauce.
Peel the onions and drop in cold water. Put in a stewpan with boiling salted water. Cook rapidly for ten minutes. Drain off the water and cover the onions with hot milk.
Simmer half an hour. Beat together 1 tablespoonful butter and 1 level tablespoonful flour. Add 1 teaspoonful salt and 1 teaspoonful white pepper. Gradually beat in cupful of the milk in which the onions are cooking. When smooth, stir the mixture into the onions and milk. Let it cook ten minutes longer.
Stewed Onions.
Cut the onions in slices and boil in salted water ten minutes. Drain, add 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 teaspoonful salt, ½ teaspoonful pepper. Cover the stewpan, and cook over a hot fire five minutes, shaking the pan occasionally. Set it back where it will cook slowly for forty minutes.
Stewed Cucumbers.
Stew pared cucumbers, cut in quarters, for fifteen minutes, with a little water and a small minced onion.
Pour off the water; stir in flour, butter, and salt; heat for two or three minutes, then serve.
Four short vegetable stews from the era of the coal range, where a pan pushed to the back of the stove was the equivalent of a burner set to low. The instructions assume a cook who knows how much of each vegetable to buy, so quantities are given only in ratios.
- Stewpan means saucepanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid, used on the stovetop. Nothing here goes in the oven.
- "Set it back where it will cook slowly"On a range, the back of the stove was the cool zone. Read it as the lowest heat that keeps a bare simmer, lid on.
- Seasoning is by ratio, not batchThe celery is salted at 1 teaspoon per 2 quarts of boiling water and again at 1 teaspoon per quart of cut celery; the onion sauce takes a cupful of the milk the onions cooked in, but the recipe never says how many onions. Salt in stages and taste, since modern butter is often salted already.
- Cut the celery times downFifteen minutes of hard boiling followed by fifteen more in butter will leave celery limp and stringy. Six to eight minutes in the water, then five to eight minutes covered in butter, gives tender pieces that still hold their shape.
- The onion sauce is a beurre manié, not a rouxButter and flour are beaten together raw, then let down with hot milk from the pan and stirred back in. The ten minutes of cooking after that is what removes the raw flour taste, so do not shorten it.
- Onions in milk scorchMilk on a hot burner catches on the bottom long before it boils over. Use a heavy pan, keep it at the barest tremble, and stir up from the base now and then.
- White pepperA teaspoon of white pepper is deliberate: it seasons the sauce without leaving black specks. Ground white pepper loses its edge fast, so use a fresh jar, and start with half if yours is potent.
- Stewed cucumbersUse large, mature cucumbers, peeled, quartered lengthwise and seeded; thin-skinned Persian or English types collapse. The flour, butter and salt stirred in at the end need two or three minutes of real cooking to thicken and lose the floury taste.
- YieldThe recipes give no quantities or yields; as a rough guide, about a quart of prepared vegetable serves four as a side dish.
Maria Parloa, credited here for the celery, ran her own cooking school in Boston and was among the first instructors at the Boston Cooking School, whose lecture-hall style of writing — ratios, timed stages, a fixed measure of salt per quart — shaped American domestic cookbooks for a generation. Celery was still a semi-luxury when these methods were set down; it was raised in trenches, blanched pale, and brought to the table upright in tall celery glasses, so cooking it was a use for the coarser outer stalks rather than the prized hearts. Stewed cucumber is the oddity to modern eyes, but it was standard English and American kitchen practice well into the nineteenth century, when cucumbers were widely thought indigestible raw and were more often boiled, stewed or pickled than sliced into a salad. Three of the four dishes share the same shape: a hard boil in salted water, then a slow finish in butter or milk — a sequence that suited a stove with hot and cool zones rather than a dial.