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Celery with Tomato Sauce
Trim the green ends from six roots of celery; do not separate the stalks, but cleanse the celery by plunging it in and out of cold water. Trim the roots and see that the celery is perfectly free from sand. Throw the bunches in a kettle of boiling water; add one teaspoonful of salt and boil twenty minutes. Drain, arrange on a flat dish, roots all one way, pour over one pint of tomato sauce and serve.
CELERY, à la FRANCAISE.
Wash and cut two roots of celery into pieces a half inch long, throw into a kettle of boiling water; add a teaspoonful of salt and boil twenty minutes. Drain in a colander. Put one tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan and add a level tablespoonful of flour, mix until smooth; add a pint of chicken stock, stir continually until it boils, add a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper, a half teaspoonful of onion juice and the celery. Cover and simmer gently ten minutes. Serve very hot.
Two dishes in one entry, both built on whole heads of celery boiled and then sauced. The instructions are sound; only the vocabulary and the boiling times need adjusting.
- "Roots of celery" means whole headsThis is the entire bunch with its base intact, not celeriac and not individual ribs. Keeping the head whole is the point of the first dish, which is plated as six little bundles all facing the same way.
- Trim and wash without splittingCut off the leafy tops and pare the base, but leave enough of the root end to hold the stalks together. Sand collects deep in the head, so fan the ribs apart under running water rather than only dipping the bunch in and out as written.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwenty minutes is a long boil -- If your celery is tender to begin with, whole heads may need only 12 to 15 minutes in salted boiling water, and the half-inch pieces in the second dish 8 to 10, or they collapse before they ever reach the sauce.
- Squeeze the drained celeryBoiled celery holds a surprising amount of water and will thin any sauce poured over it. Drain well, press gently in the colander, and blot the platter before saucing.
- A pint of tomato sauceTwo cups. The recipe assumes a tomato sauce made elsewhere in the book and does not describe it; a plain cooked tomato sauce, lightly thickened and seasoned with salt and pepper, suits the dish.
- The velouté in the second dishOne tablespoon each butter and flour to a pint of stock is a thin sauce by design, meant to coat rather than cling. Cook the roux a minute before adding stock and add the stock hot to avoid lumps.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; even a small onion will give more than the half teaspoon called for. It seasons without leaving visible pieces.
- YieldSix heads serve six as a side dish. The à la Française version, made with two heads and a pint of sauce, serves three to four.
This comes from an era when celery was a prestige vegetable in American households, sold in tall glass vases for the table and served raw as a first course at formal dinners. Heads were commonly blanched in the field by banking soil or boards against them, which produced pale, tender stalks unlike the uniformly green Pascal celery that dominates supermarkets now. Cookbooks of the period gave a good deal of space to cooking it, boiling followed by a cream, velouté or tomato sauce being a common treatment. The two dishes here pair celery with the two sauces such a book would assume were already to hand: a tomato sauce and a white sauce built on stock, the second labelled à la Française.