Home › Vegetables › Celery Soup
Celery Soup
3 roots of celery, 1 quart of milk, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 3 even tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 pint of water, Piece of onion the size of a silver Salt and pepper to taste. quarter.
Wash the celery and cut it into small pieces, using all the tops and the root. Cover with a pint of water, boil thirty minutes. Press through a colander. Put the milk on in a double boiler. Add the water and celery, pressed through the colander, also the onion, and if you like, one bay-leaf. Rub the butter and flour together, stir into the hot soup, and stir continually until it thickens. Add the salt and pepper and serve at once. Remove the onion.
A plain milk-based vegetable soup thickened with a raw butter-and-flour paste. The chief adjustments are in the vocabulary of quantities, which is looser than a modern cook would like.
- "3 roots of celery"This means three whole heads (bunches) of celery, not three individual ribs. Older kitchens used the entire plant, leaves and root end included, and the leaves are notably aromatic. Modern trimmed supermarket celery has lost the leafy tops, so two large heads plus a handful of celery leaves gets you closer.
- The onion measurement"A piece of onion the size of a silver quarter" is roughly a one-inch chunk, about a tablespoon. It goes in whole so it can be fished out before serving, as the last line instructs.
- Garbled typesettingThe ingredient list has been scrambled in the original printing: "Piece of onion the size of a silver Salt and pepper to taste. quarter." Read it as two separate lines. Nothing is missing.
- Colander versus sievePressing celery through a colander leaves a coarse, fibrous purée. A food mill or a fine sieve gives a smoother result, and a blender followed by a sieve smoother still — celery strings do not break down willingly.
- Thirty minutes of boilingThat is long by current standards but appropriate here: the celery is being cooked to collapse for pressing, not served as a vegetable. Keep the lid on so the pint of water is not boiled away.
- The beurre maniéButter and flour rubbed to a paste and stirred into hot liquid is the hinge of the recipe. Add it in small pieces, stirring constantly, and let the soup come to a bare simmer for two or three minutes afterwards — otherwise the flour stays raw and the soup tastes pasty.
- Double boilerUsed because milk scorches over direct heat. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat works if you watch it, but do not walk away.
- YieldA quart of milk plus a pint of celery water makes about six cups, or four to six servings as a first course.
Cream of celery belongs to a tradition often associated with the American fashion for milk-thickened vegetable puruilt on flour and dairy rather than on meat stock, and therefore cheap, quick and suitable for invalids, luncheons and meatless days. Celery itself was still something of a status vegetable in this period: it was grown blanched and sold standing in tall cut-glass celery vases for the table, and cookbooks of the era treat the tops and root as material for soup rather than waste. The instruction to use "all the tops and the root" is the thrifty half of that arrangement, and it remains the best advice in the recipe, since the leaves carry far more celery flavour than the pale ribs do.