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Celery Sauce
Use recipe for White Sauce, using instead of one cup of milk, one half cup of milk and one half cup of water in which celery was cooked.
Add just before serving two cups of chopped celery which has been boiled until tender.
A derived recipe: it assumes you have the book's White Sauce to hand and only tells you what to change. Everything hinges on saving the celery cooking water.
- The base sauceThe recipe only tells you to swap the liquid, so you need the book's White Sauce: a roux-based sauce of butter and flour with one cup of liquid (period formulas typically run about 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to the cup), cooked until it thickens and no longer tastes of raw flour. Here the liquid is half milk, half celery water.
- Save the cooking liquidBoil the chopped celery first and reserve the water before draining it away. This is the only place the sauce gets celery flavour beyond the pieces themselves, and without it you have white sauce with celery in it.
- How much celeryTwo cups chopped and boiled takes roughly a bunch's worth of ribs. The recipe specifies only 'chopped', so cut to whatever size you want on the spoon.
- Boil until tender, not softBoil until tender -- the recipe gives no time, only 'boiled until tender'. Ten to twelve minutes in salted water is enough for chopped ribs; longer and they collapse.
- Add at the endThe recipe does specify adding the celery just before serving, so it is only warmed through rather than stewed in the sauce.
- SeasoningSeason the finished sauce rather than the roux, since the celery water carries salt from the boiling water. A little lemon or a grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate if it tastes flat.
- Yield and servingOne cup of sauce carrying two cups of celery, so roughly three cups in all. Celery sauce was a standard accompaniment to boiled or roast fowl, boiled mutton and poached fish.
Celery sauce belongs to the long English and American line of white sauces built on butter, flour and milk, the domestic descendant of French béchamel as filtered through nineteenth-century household cookery. Celery itself was a comparatively expensive winter vegetable in the United States through the 1800s, prized enough to be served raw in tall cut-glass vases on the dinner table, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, built a reputation as a celery-growing centre by the end of the century. That abundance is why a book like this can spend two cups of it in a sauce. Lowney's Cook Book (published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer) is best remembered for its chocolate and cocoa recipes, but it also ranged well beyond them into the ordinary business of the household kitchen, including a plain sauce for boiled fowl.