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Stewed Celery
The green stalks that are not attractive on the table may be used in this way :- Scrape and wash them clean. Cut in pieces one inch long, and soak in cold water for fifteen minutes; then put them into a saucepan of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil thirty minutes, or until tender. When done, drain in a colander and throw into cold water while you make the sauce. Put one tablespoonful of butter in a frying-pan; and, when melted, add one tablespoonful of flour; mix until smooth; add a half-pint of milk and stir continually until it boils; then add three tablespoonfuls of the water in which the celery was boiled, salt and white pepper to taste. Add the celery to this sauce, stir until thoroughly heated through, and it is ready to serve. CORN BOILED ON THE COb.
CELERY au JUS.
Scrape and wash the celery. Cut it in pieces one inch long; then put in a saucepan, cover with boiling stock, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil thirty minutes. Put one tablespoonful of butter in a frying-pan and stir until a dark brown; add to it one tablespoonful of flour, mix until smooth. Drain the celery, then add a half-pint of the liquor in which it was boiled to the butter and flour; stir continually until it boils, then add salt and pepper to taste. Put the celery in a heated dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve.
Two versions of the same dish: outer celery stalks stewed and bound in a white sauce, or in a brown sauce made with stock. The main thing to reconsider is the cooking time.
- Thirty minutes is too longCut into one-inch lengths, celery is tender in 8-12 minutes of boiling and collapses into strings and mush much past that. Cook until a knife slips in with slight resistance, then stop; the celery gets a second heating in the sauce.
- Half a pintOne cup, 240 ml. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a fairly thin pouring sauce, which is what is wanted here.
- The stray heading"CORN BOILED ON THE COB" in the middle of the text is a caption or running head from the original page that has drifted into the paragraph. Ignore it; the recipe continues straight into Celery au Jus.
- Which stalksThis is written for the tough, dark outer ribs that were not sent to the table raw in a celery glass. They benefit from being peeled with a vegetable peeler to remove the strings, which is what "scrape" means here.
- The cold-water plungeDropping the drained celery into cold water stops the cooking and holds the colour while the sauce is made. Drain it well before it goes into the sauce or the sauce will thin.
- Brown butter for the au jusStirring the butter until dark brown before adding flour is the start of a brown roux. Work over moderate heat and stop at the colour of a hazelnut shell; butter solids go from brown to burnt quickly, and burnt roux is bitter and will not thicken well.
- StockThe second version needs enough stock to cover the celery and uses a cup of that cooking liquor in the sauce, so the stock does double duty. A light chicken or veal stock suits it; anything heavily reduced or salted will overwhelm the celery.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of celery; a head of celery with a cup of sauce would serve about four as a side dish.
Celery was, by tradition, a comparatively expensive vegetable, grown in trenches and blanched under boards or soil, and the pale inner heart was the part shown off raw in the tall cut-glass celery vase that stood on well-set American tables. That left the coarse green outer ribs, and cookbooks of the period are often said to offer ways to use them up: this recipe opens by saying as much. The two sauces given here are simply the standard white and brown sauces of the household repertoire, applied to a vegetable in a manner generally traced to French practice among Anglo-American cooks. Cooked celery is now unusual as a dish in its own right, having retreated into the mirepoix and the stockpot, but stewed and sauced it was ordinary enough to need no introduction.