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Sauce for Boiled Poultry
One stick of white, blanched celery, chopped very small; put it in a saucepan with one quart milk and a few black peppercorns; let it boil gently, till reduced to one pint. Keep stirring the celery up with the milk until it is in a pulp. Thicken the whole with the yolk of one fresh egg well beaten, and half a teacup of fresh cream.--Mrs. S.
A white celery sauce of the English school, meant to be ladled over a boiled fowl. It is straightforward once two things are settled: how much celery is actually intended, and how to finish it without scrambling the yolk.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolkOnce the beaten yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the yolk with a few spoonfuls of the hot milk, stir it back in, and hold the sauce below a simmer until it thickens.
- "One stick" of celeryThe unit is ambiguous: modern usage takes a stick as a single rib, while period writers sometimes used it loosely for a whole head. A single rib to a quart of milk gives very little flavour, so if you read it as one rib, three or four ribs or a whole small heart is closer to what the finished sauce wants. Chop fine so it breaks down.
- Blanched celeryThis means celery grown earthed-up so the stalks stay pale and mild, not celery dipped in boiling water. Modern supermarket celery is already comparatively pale and tender; use the inner ribs and discard the strings.
- TeacupA period teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fluid ounces, so half a teacup of cream is roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces (about 1/4 to 1/3 cup). Heavy cream is right.
- Reducing a quart to a pintExpect 30 to 40 minutes at a bare simmer in a wide pan, stirring often. Milk scorches readily on the bottom, so use a heavy-based saucepan and keep the heat low.
- PeppercornsWhole peppercorns are there for perfume, not for eating. Either tie them in muslin or strain the sauce before the yolk goes in; you can also press the celery through a sieve at that point if you want it smooth rather than pulpy.
- SaltNone is called for. Taste and salt at the end, after reduction has concentrated everything.
- YieldThe milk reduces to a pint, and the yolk and cream take it a little beyond that, so roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups, enough for six alongside a boiled chicken.
Celery sauce was the standard English partner to boiled fowl, turkey and boiled rabbit through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it travelled into American cookbooks with the rest of that repertoire. Boiling was how a large or elderly bird was made tender, and because the meat came out pale and mild the accompanying sauce carried the dish, hence the family of white sauces built on milk or cream with celery, oysters, egg or parsley. Blanched celery itself was a winter luxury of the kitchen garden, earthed up in trenches over weeks to keep the stalks pale and sweet, which is why it shows up in cold-weather cookery beside the boiled bird. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered such receipts from a network of contributing housewives, and the terse initialled attribution here is typical of the book's method.