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Cream of Celery Soup
Wash and chop fine 3 heads of celery; turn into a stew kettle, cover well with cold water and simmer for one hour. Then pulp through a sieve, return to kettle, add i quart of scalded milk, simmer thirty minutes, season with salt, pepper and nutmeg and butter, and serve with croutons.
A three-ingredient soup that lives or dies on how you treat the milk. Everything else is straightforward.
- Do not let it boil after the milk goes inMilk held at a rolling boil for half an hour will separate and catch on the bottom of the pan. Keep it at a bare tremble, stir occasionally, and treat the thirty minutes as a maximum rather than a target — fifteen is plenty to marry the flavours.
- "i quart" is 1 quartA typesetting slip for the numeral one. That is 4 cups of milk.
- "3 heads of celery"A head is a whole bunch, not a rib. Modern supermarket celery is generally larger than older sorts, so you may need less than three bunches by weight, and it is worth using the leaves, which are strongly aromatic.
- Scalded milkHeated until it steams and shivers at the edges, about 180F, not boiled. With raw milk the step knocked back bacteria and enzymes; with pasteurised milk it simply keeps the soup from dropping in temperature when you combine them.
- Pulp through a sieveA food mill or a blender followed by a sieve gets there faster. Celery is stringy, so do not skip the straining stage if you want it smooth — the fibres will not break down no matter how long you blend.
- Expect a thin soupThere is no flour and no cream here. If you want the body of a modern cream soup, cook 2 tablespoons each butter and flour together and whisk the puree into it before adding the milk.
- SeasoningSalt last and generously; a plain celery-and-water base tastes flat until it is properly salted. Nutmeg means a scrape from a whole one, an eighth of a teaspoon at most, and the butter goes in off the heat.
- YieldRoughly six cups on these quantities, enough for four as a first course.
Cream soups of this kind — a vegetable simmered soft, pushed through a sieve, and let down with scalded milk — were long a backbone of thrifty American soup cookery, and celery was a natural candidate because it was cheap, kept well in a cold cellar, and gave a strong flavour from parts nobody wanted to eat raw. Celery had a peculiar standing in the period: the crisp inner hearts were a table luxury served upright in special glass celery vases, while the tough outer ribs, roots and leaves were kitchen material, and a recipe like this is where they went. Michigan's muck fields around Kalamazoo were supplying much of the country by the turn of the century. The economics of the dish are plain enough — a quart of milk, some butter, and vegetable trimmings that would otherwise be thrown out.