Caviare
If it were not a pleasure it would be an Cayenne Pepper. imperative duty to eat caviare, for reasons which will be given when we come to sturgeon, of which it is the roe. It is to be spread on toast, with a squeeze of lemon. CAYENNE PEPPER would be much better called Red pepper, for it does not come exclusively from Cayenne. It is the powder of the dried pods and seeds of the capsicum. The name of Chillies is a Mexican name for the pods.
CELERY AND CELERIAC are cultivated varieties of a wild plant common enough in England-smallage. It was the Italian gardeners who educated smallage into celery, and brought it into European notice towards the middle of the seventeenth century. Celeriac came about the same time -its distinction being that whereas in celery the gardeners brought the stalks to perfection, in celeriac they spent their skill upon the root. Unfortunately celeriac, though on the Continent much in favour, is little known in England; yet in some respects it is more useful than celery, being reared with greater ease and at less expense, being also fit for use during eight months of the year. The name of celery is derived from the Greek for parsley; and it is curious that celeri-ac contains the Latin name (apium) added to the Greek. Ac is to be identified with the French ache, and with the final syllable of smallage; and all three are transmutable into apium on the same principle that the Scottish Mac and the Welsh Ap are dialectical varieties of one and the same word.
Celery is most seen at table in England raw, to be eaten with cheese or sometimes in salad; but its presence at table is felt in other ways, for like parsley it is in constant demand for pot and pan to heighten soup and sauce. Also it makes a soup of itself; it makes a sauce of itself; it is excellent plain boiled, as sea-kale; it will stew to perfection; and it makes a salad which is not only good in itself, but Chambord also doubly good because it may be had when other salads fail.
Celery Soup. To be made on the same principle as asparagus soup.
Celery Sauce. For poultry or game. Slice very thin four or five heads of celery, and put it into a saucepan with pepper, salt, a pinch of sugar, a sliced onion, and for every head of celery an ounce of butter. Let it stew very slowly till the celery is melted; only take care not to brown it. Then add four ounces of flour, with about a pint of milk; let it cook for twenty minutes more, and rub it through a sieve.
Purée of Celery is the same as the foregoing, but thicker. Use more celery and less milk. Finish it with a pat of butter, and serve it as a garnish for cutlets.
Celery for Garnish. - Plain boiled the same as sea-kale. Another way is to work it like endive or spinach.
Celery in Salad is excellent by itself, and may be eaten every whit as the French eat it that is, root, branch, and leaf. For additions to it try any or all of these in slices : beet-root, Spanish onion, kidney potato.
The page is a dictionary entry that shades into cookery: the caviare and cayenne notes are reference material, but Celery Sauce is a working recipe, and the purée and garnish variants hang off it. These notes address the sauce.
- Do not let it colourThe whole character of the sauce depends on sweating the celery in butter without browning. Use a heavy pan over the lowest heat with a lid or a round of parchment pressed on top, and stir often; once the celery takes on colour the finished sauce turns muddy grey-brown rather than pale ivory.
- "Four or five heads of celery"A head is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Four or five bunches is a great deal of celery and will give you a large quantity of sauce; two bunches, with butter and milk scaled down proportionally, is a more realistic domestic batch.
- An ounce of butter per headThat works out to about 2 tablespoons of butter for each bunch. It sounds generous and it is meant to be — the butter is what keeps the celery from catching while it "melts."
- The flour is out of modern proportionFour ounces of flour (nearer a cup than three-quarters) to a pint of milk gives a paste, not a sauce. Expect to add considerably more milk to reach a pourable consistency, and taste for raw flour before serving.
- Pints and gillsKettner's pint is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, not the American 16. An imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup — though this recipe itself calls for no gill.
- "Rub it through a sieve"A drum sieve and wooden spoon were the original tools. A food mill gives the closest result; a blender or stick blender is faster but aerates the sauce and can turn celery fibre stringy, so pass it through a fine sieve afterwards.
- Cooking the celery down"Stew very slowly till the celery is melted" means 30 to 45 minutes for sliced celery, longer if the ribs are thick and old. Slice as thin as the recipe asks — the sieve will not rescue undercooked celery.
- CeleriacThe entry laments that celeriac is little known in England; it is now widely sold. Peeled and diced, it can stand in for part of the celery in both the sauce and the purée and gives a rounder, nuttier result.
- Yield and servingThe full quantity, properly thinned, makes something near a quart — enough for a roast bird and a crowd. Halve or quarter it for four people. The purée version, made thicker and finished with butter, is a garnish spooned beside cutlets rather than a sauce poured over them.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written anonymously by the journalist and critic Eneas Sweetland Dallas, who borrowed the name of Kettner's, the Soho restaurant, and arranged the whole subject of eating alphabetically — which is why caviare, cayenne and celery collide in a single column here. The celery entry is characteristic Dallas: a real recipe wrapped in an etymological excursion. The core of it is sound enough — the wild plant he calls smallage is Apium graveolens, the ancestor of both celery and celeriac, and the improvement of it into a blanched salad vegetable is generally traced to Italian gardeners in the seventeenth century. His flourish about ache, apium, the Scottish Mac and the Welsh Ap is Victorian armchair philology and should be enjoyed rather than trusted. What the entry documents accurately is a division still visible today: celery eaten raw with cheese in England, celeriac scarcely sold there while the Continent prized it, and celery used constantly and invisibly as a background flavour "for pot and pan" — the role it plays in almost every stock and soup base now.