Celery Sauce
Chop celery into pieces half an inch long, enough to fill one pint measure, and stew in a small quantity of water till tender. Add one tablespoonful pepper vinegar, a little salt and pepper; pour in one teacup cream or milk, then add a sufficient quantity of drawn butter.--Mrs. S. T.
A simple white sauce built on stewed celery, meant to go over boiled fowl or turkey. Two of its terms — pepper vinegar and drawn butter — will trip up a modern cook more than any part of the method.
- Drawn butter is the hingeIn nineteenth-century American usage drawn butter is not clarified butter but a plain flour-and-butter sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour and thinned with about a cup of hot water or the celery liquor. It is what gives this sauce its body; without it you have celery floating in milk.
- Pepper vinegarA Southern pantry staple — small hot peppers steeped in vinegar, the pour-off used as seasoning. Bottled pepper vinegar is still sold; a teaspoon of cider vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce stands in acceptably.
- A pint measure of celeryChopped into half-inch pieces, a pint is about 2 cups, or four to five ribs from a medium head. Use the pale inner ribs and strip the coarse strings from the outer ones.
- A teacupIn this period a teacup is smaller than a breakfast cup; equivalents vary from book to book, so reckon somewhere between a half cup and three-quarters rather than a full 8 ounces.
- Stewing time"Till tender" is 10 to 15 minutes in barely enough water to cover. Do not drown it; the reduced cooking liquid carries most of the celery flavour and should go into the sauce rather than down the drain.
- Keep it below a boil once the cream goes inThe recipe adds cream to an acidulated base. Hold it at a bare simmer and stir; a hard boil after the vinegar risks curdling.
- YieldTwo to three cups, depending on how much drawn butter is added, enough to sauce a boiled chicken or a small turkey.
Celery sauce belongs to the long English tradition of vegetable-thickened white sauces served with boiled poultry, and it crossed into American cookbooks with that role intact, accompanying boiled fowl and turkey where a roast would have got gravy instead. Celery itself was still something of a luxury in the nineteenth-century South: it needed trenching and blanching to produce the pale tender ribs cooks wanted, and period books show it served raw as well as cooked. The pepper vinegar is the regional signature here. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, which is why the recipe closes with initials rather than a byline, and why the measurements assume a cook who already knows what drawn butter is.