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Celery au Jus
Remove the tops from two bunches of celery, leaving the bunch about six inches long. Wash, trim, and scrape root to a point. Cook in salted boiling acidulated water five minutes. Drain. Melt three tablespoons butter; add three tablespoons flour and a cup and a half of water in which celery was cooked. Season with salt, pepper, and a few drops of Worcestershire Sauce; add cooked celery and simmer thirty minutes.
Arrange celery in center of hot dish, strain sauce over it, and garnish with finely chopped pimento.
A vegetable entrée of the sort that filled out a multi-course dinner: braised celery hearts under a light flour-thickened sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the instructions assume a kitchen that no longer exists.
- What "two bunches" meansCelery of the period was generally sold leafier and looser than the trimmed heads sold now. Buy two whole heads, and cut them to about six inches; stripping the coarse outer ribs and using the paler inner ones is a reasonable reading of the instruction.
- Scrape root to a pointThe base of the head was left attached to hold the ribs together, then pared back like a pencil so it looked neat on the plate. Keep the root end intact or the bunch falls into loose sticks in the pan.
- Acidulated waterSimply water with a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar added, used to keep the celery pale. Acid also slows softening slightly.
- Total cooking timeFive minutes' blanch plus thirty minutes' simmer gives fully collapsed, spoonable celery — intentional for the period, when vegetables were served soft. Twelve to fifteen minutes in the sauce leaves the ribs tender with some bite if that suits you better.
- The sauceThree tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup and a half of liquid gives a medium-bodied sauce; cook the roux a minute or two before adding the celery water, and expect to loosen it as the celery gives up moisture. Straining at the end catches lumps and stray fibre.
- Salt the water, not just the sauceThe cooking liquid becomes the sauce, so any salt you add at the blanching stage carries through. Season the finished sauce last, after tasting.
- PimentoJarred or canned pimiento peppers, available in the period and still sold today; a well-drained roasted red pepper, finely chopped, is a close stand-in.
- YieldTwo heads of celery serve four as a side or a light course, not as a main dish.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate firm — a promotional cookbook that, having covered its employer's product in the confectionery chapters, went on to give a full course-by-course dinner repertoire. Celery earns a place in it because in late nineteenth-century America it was a prestige vegetable: expensive, labor-intensive to blanch in the field, and displayed raw upright in tall cut-glass celery vases on the dinner table. The name is loose — au jus properly means served in its own meat juices.